I’m a little bit of a Lincoln/Civil War buff (with more interest in the politics than in the military history), but here’s a fact I didn’t know until reading James McPherson’s collection of essays, Lincoln and the Second American Revolution: the Civil War took the lives of one-quarter of the Southern white men of military age. That’s a higher death toll than WWI imposed on any of the combatant nations. It seems like a pretty basic statistic, and helps make sense of the revanchisme that has actuated so much of Southern white politics ever since.