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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.71
EAN: 9780375404047
ISBN: 037540404X
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: January 08, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: January 08, 2008
Sales Rank: 6341
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented 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 Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin 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, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.
Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields—from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.
Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.
Were he alive today, This Republic of Suffering would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the “real war will never get in the books.”
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I read this book because Dr. Faust is the new president of Harvard and I wanted to see her scholarly contribution to Civil War history. This is a terrific book because it focuses on one narrow aspect of the Civil Ward: the huge death rate, and examines this topic from all possible angles. She doesn't stray from the effect of massive death and get hung up on one area. I especially liked the religious and philosophical treatment that she presents and how the loss of so much life shaped the attitudes ... Read More
Rating: -
I think the book is a must read for all Americans. It points out the numbing war statistics and the emotions attached to the deaths by from participants and the families. The complexity of the gathering of personal data re. each death or missing is well detailed. The chapters "Realizing" and "Naming" bring home, even after all of this time, the pain to the survivors and families of the dead and missing. It also shows Southern and Northern prejudices after the war and the early seeds of Jim Crow, the next ... Read More
Rating: -
Surprisingly readable account on how death was perceived and dealt with during the American Civil War. I had expected a dry, scholarly tome, but was pleasantly surprised by Dr. Faust's fine study.
Those who are interested in the social aspects of the Civil War will find this quite illuminating. Those with a military interest will not be disappointed, either.
Rating:  -
"This Republic of Suffering" is a strange book. A book on of the Civil War, it does not deal with battles but rather their aftermath - the death of over 600,000 soliders (and countless more civilians) as a direct result of the Civil War. A book that has garnered much attention on the awards front, it reads closer to the text book you would expect from the President of Harvard.
Faust puts out the theory that as a result of the Civil War, how our country viewed death changed dramatically. Each ... Read More
Rating: -
Drew Gilpin Faust's remarkable account of the death of the American Civil War should not be taken lightly. It addresses a topic that is now rarely spoken of in this country: death. She spends much of the book assisting the reader in truly understanding what it must have been like to live during and after the war. Death became an omnipresent entity for many of the people during this period of time as the war's death toll grew as time passed. Faust's account should be studied by any serious scholar of the American ... Read More
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