New estimates, based on U.S. Census data from 1870, strongly suggest that Civil War casualties totaled somewhere from 750-850,000, rather than the 600,000-plus figure used in history books for the last century and a half. According to this New York Times article:

The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.

It should always be remembered that most of the casualties of the Civil War did not come from death on the battlefield, but from the inherent dangers of army life of the day. Accidents, illness, infections. “Just being in the army in 1861,” Bruce Catton said somewhere, “was more dangerous than almost anything we know about today.”

Tip: Grim’s Hall.



Turning to an entirely different matter, if you own a Kindle, you might want to check out Free Kindle Books and Tips, a weekday blog that offers books, games, and apps, usually free. I’ve found a few things worth reading there.

Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall, recommends an article by Danny Bowes on the Noir roots of Cyberpunk:

In the end, what noir and cyberpunk share is a simultaneous, paradoxical status as distinctly past-tense forms that nonetheless keep popping up everywhere in subsequent art. … Fittingly, as each was widely criticized — and exalted — as valuing style over substance, the lasting impact of noir and cyberpunk (connecting the two as one entity, since there is no cyberpunk without noir) is greatest in the visual arts and cinema. For in the shadows lies danger and mystery. Sex and power. The simultaneous thrill and fear of confronting death. Noir, and all its descendants, including cyberpunk, is the shadow.

Our friend Ori Pomerantz directed me to this video of “The Vikings” by Depeche Mode.

Mostly historically accurate, but the music is oddly inconsistent with the themes, it seems to me. Maybe that’s because I’m old.

In any case, I think the contrast clearly shows the superiority of my book trailer, which I link here simply for purposes of instruction:

This weekend–the state fair, with a friend. Sadly, he’s a guy.

Hope your weekend is good. Especially if you live on the southeast coast.

Trevin Wax talks about what makes a blog interesting. He boils it down to curiosity. “Curiosity works itself out in two ways,” he notes.

1. “The blogger provokes a sense of curiosity and wonder in his or her readers.”
2. “The blogger has an innate curiosity that enables him or her to write from a unique perspective.”

Naturally, I’m sure he’s a big fan of BwB. I mean, how could he not be?

Late to the computer tonight. I had to pick up some family members at the airport. They’re just back from a trip to Germany and Denmark. In Denmark they were able to meet and get to know our distant relatives, in Jutland.

Needless to say, I am filled with impotent rage and envy that I couldn’t go along. However they bought me dinner, so I chose not to steer the car into an abutment, sending us all to a fiery but magnificent demise.

Over at The Corner, Michael Potemra writes of “The Inexhaustible Chesterton:”

One of the things I have come to like most about Chesterton is that he is one of the few writers whose books you can open virtually at random, and have a good chance of finding a breathtaking insight.