Facing such massive death and challenges counting the dead, Americans started to realize that numbers and statistics represented more than knowledge; they contained power, according to historian Drew Gilpin Faust.

“Numbers,” she wrote, “represented a means of imposing sense and order on what Walt Whitman tellingly depicted as the `countless graves’ of the `infinite dead.

“It’s really hard for people to grasp statistics when it comes to numbers after a certain scale,” says Lorenzo Servitje, an assistant professor of literature and medicine at Lehigh University.

“Each day we’ve become accustomed to the new reality that we don’t realize how far we’ve traveled from what normal is,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan who studies how people find meaning in suffering.

The disproportionate number of dead Americans of color, for example.