Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
This Republic of
Suffering
by Drew Gilpin Faust, Knopf (Vintage, reprint edition 2009)
Reviewed by Susan Sutherlin
With an historian's curiosity and a humanist's sensibility,
author Drew Gilpin Faust, the current President of Harvard
University, meticulously examines the cultural and social impact of
mass death on the American consciousness in the aftermath of the
Civil War in his book, This Republic of Suffering. From the sheer
magnitude of identifying the dead and ministering to the wounded,
to burying the dead and informing the family, the Battle of
Antietam still imparts a stinging reminder of the single bloodiest
day in American history, September 17, 1862, which left
twenty-three thousand dead or wounded along with thousands of
horses and mules lying in the same fields. Where battles were
enormous, hospitals sometimes even more dangerous, and mourning a
national undertaking, the poignancy of some of the smallest acts,
soldiers pinning their names to their uniforms before going into
battle certain they would die, a letter written on the only paper
available with an urgency and earnestness to convey that it had
been a 'good death,' the power of consolation as a parent dresses
the body of a son on the field-is magnified and emblematic of what
national character could possibly mean.
- Susan Sutherlin is an instructor of English at Butler
University.