British Soldiers’ Graves in the Crimea and the Origins of Modern War Commemoration
Year: 2016

The transformation of battlefields into spaces of remembrance containing the individually marked graves of dead soldiers forms one of the uniquely modern facets of war. Scholars have demonstrated how systematic and bureaucratically organized burial of military fatalities originated with the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War in the early twentieth (see, for example, Laqueur 1994 and Winter 1998). Gettysburg, according to the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, ‘sig