I've had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.

I have always loved animals, and as a child, I read a lot of horse books. I had a particular favorite called 'Silver Snaffles' that my mother gave away.

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren't any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn't necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.

Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.