The posts this week engage with the question both of how the Civil War changed cultures of death, and how the experience (or, as Carolyn writes, the process) of death was changed by the ability of news and information to traverse space ever more quickly. The flip-side is that people expected to hear news more quickly (or at all). A really lovely articulation of this came in a story that Cordelia referenced:
The anecdote about the soldier who punished himself severely after not communicating to a dead soldier’s family of his death to be quite interesting as it was considered to him to be an absolutely heinous offense. In regards to information transfer, it was not the death that he felt bad about, but his lack of communication that gave him grief.
The idea of grief also comes into play here. Historians of emotion have spilled a lot of ink on the question of whether people in the past experienced emotions the way we do and simply called them different things, or whether they experienced things qualitatively differently. Alec begins to grapple with these questions in his post, and will, I think, explore them more in his final project.
