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Death and the Civil War

A very interesting discussion can be found in the New Yorker around the American Civil War and the impact of the resultant deaths on the US. Adam Gopnik's essay "In the mourning store" is well worth a read. Gopnik's essay revolves around three new works that explore the war and the impact of death on US society: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death; and Mark E. Neely Junior's The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction.

Especially interesting to me is how - in order to deal with the horrors of war - new forms of social ritual emerged. As Gopnik points out, these rituals were "designed not so much to 'blind' survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble". In many respects, this has been echoed in most subsequent wars. Even more interesting to me is the reflection of a quite distinctive US characteristic that has been both its greatest success and greatest source of criticism, that is, how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, in which mourning became merchandised throughout a society. Indeed, the same technological advances that made the Civil War so bloody intensified and amplified the emergent rituals, in a sense democratising them, were the recent inventions of the telegraph and the photograph.

Anyway, enough of me. Have a read of it and tell me what you think.

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