This Republic of Suffering
Subtitle: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
Publisher: Vintage
Published: January 6, 2009
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 368
ISBN-13: 9780375703836
Subjects: History -- Americas -- United States -- Civil War; History -- Military -- United States; Nonfiction -- Social Sciences -- Sociology
Description: A study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.--From publisher description.