Heroes and Cowards:
The Social Face of War
Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn

Book Description

ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:

"Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn have written a superb book on bravery in the Civil War. Their work informs us not only about courage under fire, but about the many settings where people are called upon to act for a common good. This is a pioneering piece of social science."--Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard University

"In the remarkable Heroes and Cowards, Costa and Kahn demonstrate how social bonds helped determine which soldiers would fight to the death and which would flee for their lives, which soldiers would survive the deadly prison camps and which would succumb. The authors utilize the tools of social science to serve, rather than obscure, the riveting accounts by Union soldiers--the heroes, the cowards, and those in between."--Claude S. Fischer, University of California, Berkeley

"With its excellent blending of qualitative and quantitative data, this is a significant contribution to Civil War history and, more generally, to military history. It will be of great interest to economists, historians and general readers, especially the large number still fascinated by the Civil War."--Stanley L. Engerman, coauthor of Time on the Cross

"Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn are two accomplished scholars whose work offers substantially new insights, on why men desert and how this affects them; on the experience of black soldiers during and after the war; and on the migration patterns of war veterans. The research behind this book is based on data that has not previously been used by scholars, and their use of that data is imaginative and revealing. Heroes and Cowards is a significant contribution to our knowledge of how Civil War veterans coped with the stresses of war and their lives after 1865."--Roger Ransom, author of The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been

"Heroes and Cowards is a remarkable and impressive piece of economic history, a unique book that will interest a large readership."--Louis P. Cain, Loyola University Chicago

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File created: 9/23/2008

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