The subject matter notwithstanding, Ric Burns' "American Experience" film, "Death and the Civil War" easily makes its case that the bloody four-year conflict forever changed how Americans view death itself, not only because more people were killed in that war than in any other in American history, but because, for the first time, photographic images of the dead challenged what had become a pervasive idealized notion of the end of life. The film, which airs Tuesday on PBS, is based on the book "The Republic of Suffering" by Drew Gilpin Faust, who says that "Americans embarked on a new relationship with death" because of the war, which claimed 750,000 lives. Most poignant in the film are letters from dying soldiers, clearly fighting with their final reserves of strength to say goodbye to parents or wives. All of that had been shattered by the Civil War, and it was time to build a new nation state, and that the "honored dead" of Gettysburg had not only consecrated the ground with their deaths, but consecrated the need for the nation to rebuild itself and to push forward with the principles on which it was founded. Burns has done a superb job explaining the premise of how our nation's attitude changed, but there is greater focus on how Americans had viewed death before the war and what happened in the war to change that, but not enough on the nature of the post-war concept of death.
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