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The American government has learned, sometimes in fits and starts, to "manage" the problem of its troop casualties much as early nineteenth-century reformers learned to "manage" the punishment of social deviants: remove them from public view and institutionalize their recognition. As early as World War II, a major effort was made to keep photographs of dead and wounded American soldiers out of the media, and after televised newsreporting brought the Vietnam War "home" each night and helped to turn the American public against it, a dramatically different protocol was put in place for the first Gulf war and now for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No battle footage, bleeding soldiers, or flag-draped coffins are to be seen. Remembrances are consigned instead to the dry print and official wordings of interior newspaper pages, and assimilated to the formal occasions marking collective sacrifice: Armistice Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. It was remarkable, and telling, that well- placed commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an end of American "innocence."
Whatever "innocence" Americans could claim--forget, for the moment, the many atrocities committed against Indians and people of African descent since the time of European settlement--was surely lost much earlier, in the 1860s, in the hills, woods, villages, and cornfields of their own country. During those years Americans slaughtered each other in great numbers in what we have come to call the Civil War, and as a consequence they encountered dying and death on a scale never attained before or since. That encounter, Drew Gilpin Faust tells us in her moving, disturbing, suggestive, and elegant book, would not only shock, but also transform, Americans and their nation in ways that resonate to this day.
