Last January, I wrote a review of Drew Gilpin Faust’s excellent This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; it’s now out in the current issue of Knowledge@Wharton. In it, I drew some connections to our present moment that seem even more relevant now:

When Barack Obama delivered his victory speech on a mild Chicago night last November, he reminded his supporters that the election was not the endpoint. “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were,” he said. “It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.” It was not the first time Obama had evoked the concept of sacrifice — nor was it to be the last. The language of sacrifice and service was central to his campaign, and it has been a key aspect of the tone he has set ever since.
As the financial crisis deepens, other leaders have begun echoing Obama. When New York governor David Paterson recently proposed cutting state employee benefits, he argued that trying times require adjusted expectations: “We’ve made too many promises and asked for too few sacrifices. We’re going to have to change our culture as we know it.” Iowa governor Chet Culver has likewise observed, “We are all facing this challenge together. And together, we must accept the reality and share in the sacrifice.”
Obama casts the spirit of sacrifice as new — so new, in fact, that it doesn’t exist yet. In his formulation, as in those of Paterson and Culver, it exists in the future as a psychology we need to invent if the U.S. is to survive as a nation. But when it comes to American history, sacrifice has long been a unifying ideal in times of crisis — and it has also long been a concept that government has used to enlarge its scope. Indeed, the story of how the once-lean federal government has grown — and grown and grown — is closely connected to the story of how sacrifice was anointed as the ultimate form of national service.
That story is the subject of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, the stunning and thought-provoking National Book Award finalist from Drew Gilpin Faust. Currently president of Harvard University, Faust is a historian of the American nineteenth century, specializing in the antebellum South and the Civil War. Ten years in the writing, This Republic of Suffering represents the culmination of a career spent studying a pivotal moment in the nation’s past. A finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a prominent title on last year’s lists of best books, Faust’s study possesses that signal virtue of the finest works of history: This Republic of Suffering not only illuminates the past, but it also sheds light on the present.
During the Civil War, Faust argues, “sacrifice and the state became inextricably intertwined.” The 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War form the subject of her book, which explains not only how officers and troops faced death, but how families — and eventually government — responded to the increasingly unfathomable carnage brought about by a war defined by modern weaponry, epidemic disease and unanticipated length.

The rest is here.