Steven Hahn Reviews Faust and Neely

I highly recommend Steven Hahn’s New Republic review of Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering and Mark Neely’s The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction.  Although you can’t read it online I also recommend checking out James McPherson’s review of Faust and Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Cornell University Press, 2008) in the New York Review of Books.   McPherson suggests that Faust’s interpretation goes too far in equating the meaning of the war with death rather than emancipation.  Eric Foner also made this point in his review which appeared in The Nation.