Status Updates From This Republic of Suffering:...

Southerners were bewildered by the loss and faced a test of faith while northerners were reinforced in their conviction that lives had not been lost in vain. Churches grew rapidly in the south after the war, celebration of Confederate memory in ensuing decades were part of a big effort to affirm that the young lives were not lost in vain.

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This book is astonishingly readable for being about such a grim topic - I’m impressed

•1860s rise of spiritualism-ouija board, books, magazines, group meetings
•”The Gates Ajar” promised the notion that heaven is a more perfect earth, an extension of earthly world

•Death was reconceptualized as transition to a different life rather than an end, soldiers sought it over the battlefields. “Redefined as eternal life, death was celebrated in mid-nineteenth-century America.”
•Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in 1758 marked origin of movement away from the idea of heaven being far away/theocentric, but a modern notion of heaven being the same world except in its perfection