Civil War Trivia Author:Norman Bolotin, Nicholle Carriere The American Civil War has intrigued millions of readers for 150 years. But how much do we know about the real lives of Americans on the battlefields and in trenches and winter quarters when the soldiers had a respite from combat? Civil War Trivia looks inside the conflict to examine the many fascinating and heartrending stories about this great... more » war:Did you know?* It's estimated that for every 1000 Union soldiers who fought in battle, 112 were wounded or killed; this number rose to 150 for Confederate soldiers
* The casualties of the Civil War, including both North and South, totaled more than two percent of the entire population of United States at the time
* Abraham Lincoln's famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas dragged Lincoln more strongly into the abolitionist movement and made him a national figure even though he lost the senate race
* Government records estimate that some 300 women disguised as males fought alongside men during the Civil War; some retained their male identities after the war ended
* War spawns new technology, but it may be surprising just what technology developed on the Northern battlefields and not in the South -- embalming
* Civil War surgeons became so skilled at amputation that they could remove a limb and stitch up the wound in a mere 15 minutes
* Throughout the course of the war, nine percent of the total Union army consisted of black soldiers; there were 60,000 to 65,000 black soldiers in the Confederate army, but only about 20 percent of those actually saw combat.
And many more stories from behind the front lines of the Civil War...« less