This Republic of Suffering:
Death and the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust, 2008

"Americans had to identify--find, invent, create--the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individial lives--and deaths--at the same time that it redefined their nation and culture. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking."

Chapter titles include:

Dying
Killing
Burying
Naming
Realizing
Believing and Doubting
Accounting
Numbering

A morbid topic for modern readers for whom death usually occurs at a distance, but very well-written and thoroughly researched.