HIST 221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Morphine
14 Mar 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Numbers on top of numbers: couning the civil war dead, drew gilpin. At the end of the the war, almost half of union and high proporion of confederate dead remained unknown, failed to honour the dead and failed to accurately count them. We will do these things beter in the next war . Civil war oten cast as last old fashioned and irst modern war, a war of transiion. Cited as 620,000 dead, a mid-century infatuaion with numbers . Numbers represented a means of imposing sense and order vs viewing it as countless . Failures of records an outcome of a bureaucraic incapacity that arose from the unanicipated scale of conlict. In postwar batle for glory, deaths become a measure not of defeat, but of victory. Portrait of challenges, clouds of fever and morphine . 1866-70, war department acknowledged their deiciencies in records. 1862, creaion of an extensive pension system for union veterans and made systemaic data about military service.
