Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation
by: Neff, John R.

Hardcover. Lawrence KS, University Press of Kansas, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. By the end of the Civil War, fatalities from that conflict had far exceeded previous American experience, devastating families and communities alike. As John Neff shows, commemorating the 620,000 lives lost proved to be a persistent obstacle to the hard work of reuniting the nation, as every memorial observation compelled painful recollections of the war. Neff contends that the significance of the Civil War dead has been largely overlooked and that the literature on the war has so far failed to note how commemorations of the dead provide a means for both expressing lingering animosities and discouraging reconciliation. Clean copy.