Two percent of the United States population died in uniform during the United States Civil War. That's the equivalent of 6 MILLION people dying in today's America, a staggering comparison.
Drew Gilpin Faust, currently the president of Harvard University, has published a critically acclaimed accounting of how those many deaths changed the culture of America and how that collective suffering helped bridge the divide between North and South.
My reading list is already very long, so I don't think I will get to this one any time soon, but follow the link to a review in the New York Times. Any of you interested in the history and cultural significance of death should get this into your library immediately, and maybe one of the associations such as NFDA should invite Ms. Gilpin Faust to speak.
NYTimes.com: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Update: I changed my mind and decided to put this book at the top of my reading list today. Here's the central thesis:
“… As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced. Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”
I will keep you posted.
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