HISTORY 199 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Social Stratification, Ars Moriendi, History Of The Southern United States
22 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
In line with the idea of a good death, the american antebellum south heavily stressed the value of dying at home and exhibiting christian piety in one"s last moments as a part of ars moriendi. It was this conception of death, coupled with the unsettling anonymity of death and sheer overwhelming number of dead that made the realities of death in the civil war especially difficult to stomach. In line with the ideas that we have discussed in class, the. Civil war represents a huge departure from conventionally accepted ideas of death. Often in the absence of proof of a corporeal death and a undeniable death from lack of correspondence, learning of and facing death during the civil war as incredibly difficult to deal with. As faust explains, there was no national or even local system of identification which made the task of returning bodies to or even notifying the families of the dead particularly daunting.
