Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

historian Benedict Anderson. “No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers,” observed Anderson in his seminal book Imagined Communities, which argued against seeing nationalism as a cousin of political ideologies like fascism (to which its more extreme incarnations were often compared). According to Anderson, the closer analogy was to religion, with similarly deep questions posed—Why had these young men died? What could the living do to honor them?—and similar comfort drawn from the shared belief that some measure of redemption could be extracted from the noble sacrifices of one’s forebears.