This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust
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This Republic of Suffering
Death and the American Civil War

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Narrator: Lorna Raver

Unabridged: 10 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/15/2008

Categories: Nonfiction, History

Synopsis

During the Civil War 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. The equivalent proportion of todays population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of the enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture reconciled the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God. 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 Wars most fundamental and widely shared reality.

About Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. A former dean and university president, she is the author of several books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Massachusetts.

Reviews

Goodreads review by robin on May 25, 2024

The Civil War And The Harvest Of Death Most books on the American Civil War can be grouped into one of two categories. The first category consists of studies of the military history of the conflict, frequently focusing on individual battles or campaigns. The second category focuses on the political a......more

Goodreads review by brian on June 16, 2008

you know that very un-scientific statistic about how the average male thinks about sex once every two minutes? well, triple that and replace 'sex' with 'death' and that's me. at the age of twelve, i'm certain woody allen used me as the basis for his character in Hannah and her Sisters. and ol' leo p......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on August 15, 2015

I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American history- or anyone who wants to know how many of our traditions grew out of the Civil War. The book also gives a good summary of how the role of government began to evolve in the latter half of the 19th Century. The enormity o......more

Goodreads review by Chris on February 03, 2025

A deeply moving exploration of how the death of 620,000 soldiers -- plus civilians -- during the Civil War changed Americans' views of death. Drew Gilpin Faust examines (among many things) how the carnage shattered our views of the afterlife, changed the literalness of Christian faith and resurrecti......more

Goodreads review by Steve on August 16, 2008

Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering is a necessary, and long overdue, cultural history of a largely ignored aspect of the Civil War. Basically, it’s a history of Death on a massive scale in what many historians view as the first modern war, and how society (or societies – North and South)......more

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