Faust

2008 · 83725 — New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2008. Third Printing stated. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xviii 346 2 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Acknowledgments. Index. Contents include: Preface: The Work of Death and Chapter 1--Dying: "To Lay Down My Life"; Chapter 2: Killing: "The Harder Courage"; Chapter 3: Burying: " New Lessons Caring for the Dead"; Chapter 4: Naming: "The Significant Word UNKNOWN"; Chapter 5: Realizing; Civilians and the Work of Mourning; Chapter 6: Believing and Doubting: ''What Means this Carnage"; Chapter 7: Accounting: "Our Obligations to the Dead"; Chapter 8: Numbering: "How Many How Many"; and Epilogue: Surviving. Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust born September 18 1947 is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University the first woman to serve in that role. In 2014 she was ranked by Forbes as the 33rd most powerful woman in the world. In 1975 Faust joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty as assistant professor of American civilization. A specialist in the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War Faust rose to become Walter Annenberg Professor of History. She is the author of six books including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War for which she won both the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians in 1997. Her works include This Republic of Suffering which was an acclaimed exploration of how the United States' understanding of death was shaped by the losses during the Civil War. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. 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 620000 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 freed people 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. Alfred A. Knopf hardcover