Drew Gilpin Faust of Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute will speak on "Accounting for Death: Reflections on the Evolution of the Casualty List." At a moment when Americans find themselves confronted daily by counts of Iraq war dead, this lecture will explore the emergence in the Civil War era of a commitment to counting and accounting for the war dead. A growing concern with compiling accurate statistics of military losses and a new sense of the importance of numbers as an instrument of understanding created both public and private initiatives to specify the total of war dead. Both numbers and the numbering of the Civil War dead are products of fundamental social, cultural, and military transformations that inaugurated the warfare of our own time.

The lecture is free and individuals who want to attend do not have to register for the American Historical Association's annual meeting.