Pick of the Day: Death and the Civil War (DVD)

Death and the Civil War. DVD. 2 hrs. Prod. by WGBH Educational Foundation. Dist. by PBS Dist. 2012. ISBN 978-1-60883-759-5. $24.99.
Gr 9 Up–The Civil War, the first modern and industrial war, resulted in 750,000 casualties, a scale of death unprecedented in American history. This documentary, based on Drew Gilpin Faust’s book This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, 2008), examines the ways the nation dealt with this unspeakable tragedy. Narrated by Oliver Platt, the film utilizes historical photographs and primary sources, especially letters written by soldiers, to tell the history of the war fromFortSumtertoAppomattox. Also examined are the changes Americans were forced to make in the way they looked at death. Soldiers died far from home and from loved ones, and were often buried with no coffins or ceremonies or records of the grave sites. The government had no infrastructure for burial, no ambulance corps to assist the wounded, no systems to identify bodies or notify families, no national cemeteries, and no federal obligation to the dead. That all changed as a result of the Civil War. Faust and other historians tell the story, including accounts of African Americans who buried Union dead, the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Clara Barton who took medical supplies to the battlefields and after the war created a clearinghouse of missing soldiers, the work of Southern women who organized to identify and rebury Confederate dead, and the establishment of Memorial Days. Featuring exquisite editing, excellent narration, and appropriate music, this film should be an essential part of our understanding of the Civil War.–Patricia Ann Owens, llinois Eastern Community Colleges, Mt.Carmel