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As significant as these two points are, Manning's greatest contribution is her insistence on connecting military, political, and social history. Those connections are something historians often talk about but rarely attend to. We frankly don't need another history of the Battle of Bull Run that focuses solely on the minutiae of military maneuvering, and, great storyteller though he was, we don't need another Shelby Foote. We need more Chandra Mannings, historians who understand that the best military history—whether the subject be the Civil War or "Operation Iraqi Freedom"—is always the history of ideology, too.
Despite Manning's exhaustive research—she seems to have read, and made good use of, nearly every primary and secondary source plausibly connected to her topic—she neglects to grapple with, or even cite, Stephen Hahn's seminal 1983 study The Roots of Southern Populism. There, Hahn shows that yeomen fought a war for slavery because, even though they didn't own slaves themselves, the system of slavery safeguarded yeomen's "communal, prebourgeois" society, and in general protected yeomen from the hardships of capitalist social relations. Hahn's is a much more precise and persuasive argument than Manning's more generalized assertions that white Southern yeomen were drawn into the war because slavery "undergirded white Southerners' convictions of their own superior moral orthodoxy," helped yeomen feel manly, and was tied in with their "unobstructed pursuit of material prosperity." Still, such nitpicking aside, What This Cruel War Was Over establishes Manning as one of the most significant Civil War historians of the next generation.
The Civil War changed virtually every aspect of American society, from religion to gender roles. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, has devoted her new book to exploring how the war changed American death. In the Civil War, over 2 percent of the nation's population died—which, as Faust points out, was roughly equivalent to the entire state of Maine being killed, or twice the population of Vermont. The Victorian choreography of "the good death" was inadequate for dealing with the mind-boggling numbers, the stench, the mangled corpses of men too young to die. Americans had to overhaul their notions of what death could and should look like, and even what kind of God could be said to be present—or absent—during such death.
Many of the concrete changes in American dying that Faust documents involve the government's role in military death; indeed, it was the Civil War that created governmental responsibilities that we now take for granted, such as next-of-kin notification, which neither the Union nor the Confederacy viewed as their job in 1861. At the outset of the war, the Union had no organized method for burying, or even identifying, dead soldiers. That began to change with the 1862 passage of a law giving the president power to purchase land for a national cemetery for soldiers; cemeteries were established at Chattanooga, Stones River, Knoxville, Antietam, and, of course, Gettysburg.
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