The scars left by the war still ran deep – between the Union and the Confederate states, 620,000 combatants lost their lives. To put that in perspective, if 2% of today’s U.S. population perished in war, that would be 6.5 million people. It seems to be in our nature, no matter the society in which we live, to remember lives lost in war. There has been a debate raging in recent years about whether humanity is innately warlike and whether we are, in fact, becoming less warlike as our societies become more sophisticated and interconnected. World War I and World War II claimed almost 522,000 American lives between the two of them and more than 100 million people around the world.

Source: The Herald May 25, 2024 02:06 UTC