Death and the Civil War

From acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns, Death and the Civil War explores an essential but largely overlooked aspect of the most pivotal event in American history: the transformation of the nation by the death of an estimated 750,000 people – nearly two and a half percent of the population – in four dark and searing years from 1861 to 1865.

Based on the groundbreaking book This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust, Death and the Civil War tracks the increasingly lethal arc of the war, from the bloodless opening in 1861, through the chaos of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the unspeakable carnage of 1864 – down through the struggle, in the aftermath of the war, to cope with an American landscape littered with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many unburied, most unidentified.

Death and the Civil War will premiere on PBS' American Experience on Tuesday, September 18th at 8/7 C.  Death and the Civil War was produced with a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.