This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust was, to me, an extraordinary book because, as I said earlier, we have written so much and watched so many movies that we think we know all about the Civil War. But what the Civil War was about, when you break it down to its essential components, was mass killing on a scale that we had never ever dreamed of. I have seen one estimate that if we were to have the same number of people killed today, as a percentage of the American population, we would have lost six million people. The whole process of caring for the dead and burying the dead and documenting the dead was a totally new experience. There was no such thing as national cemeteries, for example, until the Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust takes on this rather serious task of documenting and, through her research and writing, demonstrating just how impactful the Civil War was on the consciousness of Americans to deal with this rather grim reality of mass death and mass killing.” Read more...

The best books on American History

Brent Glass, Historian