This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (History) Drew Gilpin Faust

 The US Civil War, like the Crimean War, occupies an intermediate place in the history  of warfare between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Technological development between Waterloo and the middle of the nineteenth century, though impressive, was to be dwarfed by  the corresponding changes in the second half of the century and, even more, by innovations  between 1914 and 1918. This interesting book is not a history of the war but an account of some of the changes that it wrought in American society.

Central to the book is the concept of "the good death", which included notions like being reconciled to the idea of dying, reaffirming the worthiness of the cause  and expressing traditional pieties for the benefit of families and friends (so important was this concept that surviving comrades often wrote to the families of dead soldiers affirming that they had complied with these conventions even when they clearly hadn't). Some families went to enormous lengths to find the bodies of their sons and bring them home. 

Deaths in the war,  whether of soldiers or civilians, whether from wounds or disease were on a scale for which American society was unprepared. The responses were both institutional (ambulances, welfare organisations, army liaison with families, war graves registration) and commercial (freelance embalmers, sellers of elaborate coffins). The war also coincided (more or less) with the development of some of the wilder speculative flights of Protestantism about the nature of the afterlife and, consequently, the type of reunion with the dead that survivors could expect.

In subsequent wars the United States' armed forces  have  sometimes been the target of derision for the emphasis they place on the welfare of their troops ("How many flavours of ice cream does an army need?"). But  concern for the welfare of soldiers is entirely  admirable and if governments are going to have obsessions this is a good one.  It may be that it is one of the most enduring effects of the American Civil War.