Friday, February 08, 2008
Archives and Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Reading Archives: "Faust argues that the American Civil War brought with it a new kind of national meaning: “The rhetoric of Civil War mortality statistics provided the language for a meditation on the deeper human meaning of the conflict and its unprecedented destructiveness, as well as for the exploration of the place of the individual in a world of mass – and increasingly mechanized – slaughter. It was about what counted in a world transformed” (p. 265). Although it is not Faust’s intent to write a meditation on the archival impulse, archivists and others interested in archives reading this book will come away with a deeper sense of why records are created and why they are preserved."
Labels: Civil War, death, Drew Gilpin Faust, electronic records, memory, National Archives, suffering
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