Faust on Death and the Civil War

Another week of light blogging; sorry about that. It's midterm exam time at AU, and I'm spending my evenings slogging my way through freshmen exams in my survey classes. The vast majority of my students are great, but on occasion...well, I just read an exam in which one student somehow got the impression that Washington surrendered to Cornwallis at Yorktown, and morphed the "Pequot" War into the "Puked" War. As Krusty the Clown would say, "Geeeezzz!."

I have managed to finish a really top-notch new Civil War book, however (getting stuck in the Milwaukee airport last week did wonders for my reading time): Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. I would have preferred posting a longer, more comprehensive review--but I gotta get back to the Puked War.

Let me just say in brief here, however...wow. It was well worth the wait (Professor Faust was in the early stages of research on this project when I met her ten years ago, so suffice to say it's been in the works for a while; I guess running Harvard University really cuts into one's writing time, huh?). It is a tour de force of social, cultural and military history that left me at once dazzled, intrigued, and, well sad (consider the subject). Faust has managed to write both a solid intellectual history and a riveting narrative. Her overall theme---that Americans redefined death in ways that were both ironic and sentimental, to account for the war's tremendous death toll--is convincing, and her eye for detail and telling anecdotes is superb.

I'll revise about a half dozen lectures to account for her insights. Faust even offered some arguments that will influence the way I write about Lincoln and race. Bottom line: go read this book.