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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. (New York: Knopf, 2008. Pp. xviii, 346. Cloth $27.95.)
For one of the few experiences shared by all living beings, death has been accorded remarkably little attention from historians. Anthropologists have long recognized the centrality of rituals surrounding the end of life to a society's culture, but historians, with a few notable exceptions, have generally avoided a subject that might prove just as illuminating of larger meaning patterns as do far more popular topics, like birth and marriage.
One key moment of change in American conceptions of and responses to mortality was the Civil War. For those who lived through it, the experience was one, above all else, of death. So many Americans met their ends in this war (620,000 soldiers and perhaps 50,000 civilians) that the nation was forced to create new traditions of mourning, new technologies of preserving and burying bodies, and new spiritual conceptions that would allow them to reconcile the slaughter with their understanding of a benevolent God. One in five military-aged men in the South was killed during the war. Even for a society far more familiar with mortality than our own, these numbers were not just staggering, they were...