| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 200 words from this article are provided below; about 375 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death. By Mark S. Schantz. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xviii, 245 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8014-3761-8.)

It is unsurprising that, as the casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq have continued to climb, recent interest in the Civil War has centered on how citizens and soldiers dealt with the unprecedented lethality of that conflict. Mark S. Schantz's study is a noteworthy addition to a discussion that includes, most notably, Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering (2009). Both authors treat similar material, but Schantz proceeds from the assumption that cultural attitudes toward death and war in the United States circa 1860 were fundamentally different from our own. Whereas Faust's study presents the Civil War as a caldron in which an essentially modern sensibility concerning death—bureaucratic, materialist, and closely linked to nationalism—was formed, Schantz argues that the war's slaughter was driven, at least in part, by an ideology that seems alien today. Soldiers were willing to sacrifice themselves in such large numbers because they earnestly believed in the value of the "good death" and had before them a firm vision of an immediately accessible and fully limned heaven.

. . .

There are about 375 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.