Death evolved in 4 grisly years - KansasCity.com

In the mood for some light entertainment? How about a two-hour film about death and dying, complete with photos of unburied corpses?

The subject matter notwithstanding, Ric Burns? ?American Experience? film ?Death and the Civil War,? airing tonight on PBS, 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. At first, the war was seen almost as a minor contretemps. No one expected it to last very long and, indeed, between April and June 1861, a total of 20 people, from both sides, died. All of that changed with the Battle of Bull Run that summer, which claimed more than 800 lives. It?s important to understand how Americans looked at death before the war because that view is so alien to many of us now. Of course, death is always part of life, but the prevailing belief in the early decades of the republic was that you needed to think about death every day to ensure a good life. Having a ?good death? was an omnipresent goal in the lives of many people. And a good death was defined as dying at home, uttering last words and being surrounded by loved ones. Having a good death meant having a corpse, mourners, sacred text and transport to a place of rest. This is standard in virtually all civilizations. But this was often impossible for the Civil War dead. Parents and siblings were often left in the dark about the fate of a family member. On the battlefields, soldiers routinely made pacts with tentmates to notify family members if they were killed, and often wrote ?final? letters home as they were going into battle. 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. And when they were mortally wounded, soldiers would often arrange photographs of family members around themselves. The film makes the case that the sea change in the country?s view of death was significant to our history, as evidenced in Lincoln?s address at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. The ?honored dead? of Gettysburg had not only consecrated the ground with their deaths, but consecrated the need for the nation to rebuild itself. Burns has done a superb job explaining the premise of how our nation?s attitude changed. He focuses 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. Yes, we get that it was different and at one point, Lynch says that ?the age of our disbelief? began with the Civil War. The statement rings true, but it also makes us want to know more about how that has manifested in our culture over the years. It is perhaps easier to quantify the effect of the war through some numbers: About 20 percent of white, military-age men from the South were killed in the war. After the Emancipation Proclamation, 180,000 former slaves joined the Union forces, only to be given the most dangerous or menial jobs; one-fifth of those men were killed. Because of a massive postwar location and identification project, the bodies of 300,000 Union soldiers were re-interred in national cemeteries. It cost $1.59 per body to rebury them.

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/09/18/3819919/death-evolved-in-4-grisly-years.html

f 18 jet crash in virginia beach john tortorella nicki minaj beez in the trap video food network good friday f/a 18