Drew Gilpin Faust Books
Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and the former president of Harvard University. A leading scholar of the American South and the Civil War, she has written extensively on issues of gender, race, and death in nineteenth-century America.
Known for: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Books by Drew Gilpin Faust
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
What happens to a nation when death becomes its most common shared experience? In This Republic of Suffering, historian Drew Gilpin Faust argues that the American Civil War did far more than decide the fate of the Union or end slavery’s legal foundation. It also forced Americans to confront death on a scale they had never imagined. More than 620,000 soldiers died, leaving families without bodies, graves, explanations, or closure. Faust shows how this staggering loss transformed not only private grief, but public institutions, religious belief, government responsibility, and the country’s moral imagination. Drawing on letters, diaries, sermons, hospital records, burial reports, and official correspondence, she reconstructs how soldiers, nurses, families, clergy, and politicians struggled to make sense of mass death. The result is a deeply human history of war that shifts attention from generals and battlefields to mourning, memory, and obligation. Faust’s authority as one of America’s leading Civil War historians makes this book both intellectually rigorous and emotionally powerful. It matters because it reveals that modern America was shaped not only by victory and emancipation, but also by suffering, loss, and the labor of remembering the dead.
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The Civil War redefined dying
A society reveals its deepest values in how it imagines a good death. Before the Civil War, many nineteenth-century Americans believed dying should follow a recognizable script: the dying person would be at home, surrounded by family, spiritually prepared, offering final words of faith and love. Thi...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Killing demanded moral reinvention
War does not simply require men to kill; it requires them to explain killing to themselves. One of Faust’s most striking contributions is her exploration of how Civil War soldiers reconciled Christian morality with the brutal necessity of combat. Most soldiers came from a culture that condemned murd...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Burying became a national obligation
The treatment of the dead reveals the seriousness of a society’s promises to the living. In the Civil War, burial became one of the most urgent and painful challenges facing soldiers, families, and the state. Bodies often lay unattended after battles, decomposed in heat, or were buried hastily in sh...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Naming the dead restored personhood
A name is often the final defense against disappearance. In a war of unprecedented scale, one of the greatest fears for soldiers and families alike was anonymity. To die unknown, buried without identification, was more than unfortunate; it threatened erasure. Faust shows that naming the dead became ...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Loss forced Americans to realize scale
Human beings can understand tragedy one life at a time, but mass death requires a new kind of perception. Faust argues that Americans during the Civil War gradually came to “realize” the scale and meaning of death through accumulation: casualty lists, hospital wards, amputated limbs, overcrowded cem...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Belief and doubt battled together
Suffering does not always destroy faith, but it almost always tests it. Faust explores how the Civil War became a religious crisis as well as a military one. For many Americans, Christian belief offered the primary language for understanding death. Ministers preached that sacrifice had purpose, that...
From This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
About Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and the former president of Harvard University. A leading scholar of the American South and the Civil War, she has written extensively on issues of gender, race, and death in nineteenth-century America.
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Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and the former president of Harvard University. A leading scholar of the American South and the Civil War, she has written extensively on issues of gender, race, and death in nineteenth-century America.
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