Drew Gilpin Faust, Civil War historian and first female president of Harvard University, was recently interviewed by Terry Gross about her new book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (Here’s the link to the interview.) Religion faculty and students interested in death and dying or American religious history would find this very interesting. She described how the mass carnage of the Civil War changed the way Americans saw death. It was very important that loved ones knew how someone died because that said a lot about his/her chances in the next life. Soldiers were very afraid of dying unknown on battlefields and they’d pin tags with their names somewhere on their body before going into battle, or make sure that a letter addressed to them was on their person, or they’d buy commercially available name tags. This was before “dog tags” and, all in all, the military wasn’t not really organized to, well, organize all the mass deaths. There was little organization to the identification and removal of bodies fallen in combat. Lots of grieving families never heard what happened to their sons. According to Faust Heaven became a better place during this period because people wanted to feel that all those killed would have some respite from suffering. Faust made a few suggestive comments about how the rising role of science influenced this story. Finally, it was a great time for spiritualists who claimed to be able to contact slain soldiers in the afterlife.
Drew Gilpin Faust interviewed on NPR
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