Tag: Civil War
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The American Civil War as a biological phenomenon: Did Salmonella or Sherman win the war for the North?
Michael BrownChicago, Illinois, United States Reexamining Civil War deaths A demographic historian, J. David Hacker, recently discovered an unfortunate truth; using newly digitized data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, he constructed new estimates of Northern and Southern Civil War deaths. In his pivotal analysis published in 2012, the death toll in the American…
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The imponderable ‘what-ifs’: Did the medical issues of three Confederate generals cause the South to lose the war?
Kevin R. Loughlin During the darkest days of World War II, Winston Churchill was credited as saying, “The imponderable ‘what- ifs’ accumulate”. Throughout history, imponderable what ifs have provoked the observer to consider how historical outcomes may have turned out differently. Such it is with the Civil War. It can be reasonably argued that the…
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Caring for “Our Boys”
Joanne MurrayPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, United States When the United States entered World War I in 1917, those in the U.S. Army Medical Department found themselves handling new types of wounds as a result of new methods of modern warfare. The staggering volume of war-related illness, complicated by the influenza pandemic, added to their challenges. These caregivers…