"You Take That Many People Out of a Civilization, and You Get a Haunted Society"

"The scene itself is fictional, sketched in Walt Whitman's poem 'Come Up From the Fields, Father,' but it describes a reality lived by tens of thousands of families, North and South, during the Civil War. Approximately 750,000 soldiers died in the war, more casualties than the United States experienced in the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam and all other American wars combined: (With about 21/2 % of the population dead, that makes it the equivalent of 7 million in today's terms.)
"And these occurred in a traditional, heavily Protestant nation that had a firm set of rites and rituals for making sense of death, none of which included falling many miles from home, far from family, last words unrecorded. Roughly half the dead were never identified (and two-thirds of dead black soldiers), the bodies buried anonymously."

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times talks to Ric Burns about Burns's new PBS documentary, Death and the Civil War, based on Drew Gilpin Faust's 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering.