http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/arts/television/death-and-the-civil-war-by-ric-burns-on-pbs.html
A Wave of Staggering Loss, in a Country Unprepared
‘Death and the Civil War,’ by Ric Burns, on PBS
By
NEIL GENZLINGERSEPT. 17, 2012
PBS’s “American Experience” can feel formulaic, but the episode on Tuesday,
“Death and the Civil War,” makes itself wrenching and riveting by throwing out some of the formulas that have become familiar in documentaries about the war.
The program, written and directed by Ric Burns, focuses on one overwhelming fact of the Civil War that others bury in an avalanche of minutiae: An unprecedented number died during the four years of fighting.
There are no detailed maps of troop movements in Mr. Burns’s treatment. The great generals show up only for cameos. Yes, actors give dramatic readings of letters, and the camera technique is straight out of “The Civil War,” the breakthrough documentary on which Mr. Burns worked with Ken Burns, his brother. But unlike other such works, “Death and the Civil War” avoids the temptation to wander. It never loses focus on its sobering subject.
In one revelatory segment after another, it explores what it was like for people of the day to be confronted with all that death in so short a span. Monday was the 150th anniversary of Antietam, still the bloodiest day of battle in American history.
New research has found that the death toll in the war, long put at just over 618,000, was probably about 750,000.
“Transpose the percentage of dead that mid-19th-century America faced into our own time: Seven million dead, if we had the same percentage,” says
Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, whose book “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War” is the basis for the program. “What would we as a nation today be like if we faced the loss of seven million individuals?”
Photo
The documentary "Death and the Civil War," written and directed by Ric Burns, includes photographs like this one of soldiers who died in battle. Credit Library of Congress
Like the book, the program is divided into subsections — “Dying,” “Burying,” “Accounting” — that treat different aspects of wartime death, and each reveals a country that was completely unprepared for the losses the war brought. Most people, we’re told, at first expected the conflict to be brief and to be a gentlemanly, low-casualty affair like some of the wars that had come before. No one understood what the combination of large armies and modern weaponry would do, or how bringing thousands of men together in camps would be an invitation to infectious diseases.
“The war has the misfortune of being fought at a time when military tactics, military strategy was a step behind technology,” the historian
J. David Hacker says, “and being fought about 10 years before we really had a proper understanding of what causes disease, how to prevent disease from breaking out and how to treat what diseases we have.”
American Experience
Death and the Civil War
Produced for PBS by WGBH Boston. Written and directed by Ric Burns; Mark Samels, executive producer; Li-Shin Yu, editor; Robin Espinola, Bonnie LaFave and Mr. Burns, producers; Oliver Platt, narrator; original concept developed by Paul Taylor; Buddy Squires, Stephen McCarthy and Allen Moore, cinematographers; music by Brian Keane.