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[[File:This_Republic_of_Suffering.jpeg|thumbnail|left|250px|This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust]]

With the emergence of the new social history in the 1960s, historians had a compelling ability to situate particular subjects within broader frameworks of historical experiences. One of the unique sub-fields to come out of the new social history was the role of death in specific experiences of various cultures and societies. Philippe Ariés was one of the first historians to study death and its impact on the western world. David E. Stannard introduced American interactions with death in his 1977 book, <i>The Puritan Way of Death</i>. Ariés's book, along with several others, formulate fascinating narratives about the way death actively interacts with cultures, but there had never been a book-length publication about the role of death in the lives of Americans living during the deadliest war in American history, the Civil War.

Overall Faust’s book is groundbreaking in the way she uses primary sources to contend with the impact of death on an individual level and thought-provoking because of her ability to connect those individual interactions with larger national developments in regards to the soldier dead. By using personal stories from soldiers on both sides of the war and of all social classes, Faust paints a clear and concise picture of death’s capacity to change society at all levels. Her book would compliment any study of nineteenth-century American culture or articulations about the American Civil War and its lasting impact on national policy.