This Republic of Suffering

A bestselling, prize-winning, eye-opening study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and consequences of death in the face of the unprecedented slaughter of the Civil War-now with a new introduction by the author

NATIONAL BESTSELLER .NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST. An “extraordinary … profoundly moving” history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War thatreveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation.

An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Author Biography

DREW GILPIN FAUST was president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention- Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.