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Title: The Human Cost of War: White Population in the United States, 1850-1880
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2001
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Abstract: Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.1 Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.2 During the last decade historians have answered Vinovskis’s call for a social history of the Civil War. We now have several excellent monographs on women’s response to the war, numerous studies of the northern and southern “home fronts,” dozens of community studies that illuminate how race, class, and gender shaped the wartime experiences of ordinary Americans, and a growing number of studies on the wartime and Reconstruction experiences of African Americans. Few studies, however, have looked beyond the immediate stress of the war to examine its long-term consequences, and virtually no research has built upon Vinovskis’s preliminary demographic speculations to examine the war’s impact on postwar population. The lack of long-term study is most regrettable in the South, which lost an estimated . . .
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Authors: Hacker, J.David
Periodical (Full): Journal of Economic History
Issue: 2
Volume: 61
Pages: 486-489
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Race and Ethnicity
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