Harvard pres. discusses book
While the soldiers of the American Civil War are long dead, they were preoccupied with their deaths long before we were.
While researching for her last book, Harvard University President and historian Drew Gilpin Faust noticed a startling lack of scholarly work on the theme of death in the Civil War, she said at a talk here on Wednesday. The resulting book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” gives a historical account of 0ne of the most bloody periods in American history, but its central themes of disillusionment, post-traumatic stress and bereavement...
Low birth rates amongst Western populations are also contributing to great anger over the Iraq war than other wars. Nation's with families of only 2 children cannot fight a prolongued conflict. It is also why Europeans with their extremely low birthrates refused to fight in the Iraq war.
I have read that book, and if it counts as solid historical scholarship then academic history is in very deep trouble.
There's not enough space here to rehearse Faust's scandalous abuse of data in that book. However, I invite the reader to examine the book's early comparision of Revolutionary War and Civil War statistics to get a basic feel for how poorly reasoned it is ... and then continue reading with dropped jaw.
As a kind of miniature, consider her assertion here that "public outrage against the Civil War was much more muted [than outrage against the Iraq War] in part because of contemporary Christian anticipation of the afterlife, which made it easier to accept death." An interesting suggestion, but it's almost certainly beyond all evidence to check whether this assertion is true or not ... which does not dtop Faust from making the assertion. There is much contrary evidence: Nazi Germany, Hirohito's Japan and Stalinist Russia were all anti-Christian, but violently warlike. Where is the evidence of increased "outrage" in those countries Faust posits arises from the absence of a faith in an afterlife ... Christian or otherwise? How does one explain that many of the strongest opponents of wars in Christian countries are often (even usually) devout Christian ministers, taking William Sloane Coffin as but one of many examples. Consider the broad opposition to war - and all forms of human-caused death - promulgated by the Vatican in its campaign against what the Catholic Church terms the modern "Culture of Death." Faust's assertion is very bad history in action.
Judging by this book, which is the only book Faust has written that I have read, Faust is a pretty weak historian given to fascile confusion of "causation" with "concomitant variation" and whose real gifts lie in self-promotion. I am also told by someone who worked with her for many years as a full professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, that she had the good judgment to marry a man far more capable than herself, a man who has advanced her career in self-negating fashion. Of course, it's not politically correct to make such observations in today's academe. But, unlike Faust, my Penn source has lots of evidence to support this assertion.