assessments of them and sort of tried bring those two bodies one quantitative and one qualitative together to make a clear story. why did you decide to write the book in the first place? i was interested in the question of why we fight wars and how we explain those and that for me ermg emerge as most important elm of that. confederates far long time. particularly for lower and nonslave holding confederates. lower class. the argument has been it s a somewhat irrational war. doesn t make sense for them to fight and my arguement what i tell my students we have to give historical actors the same credit we would give ourselves. we rationalize is the bad way to put it i think. but we explain things to ourselves in ways that make sense and they did the same thing and it was trying to figure out why they start and how they understand it over time because we continue to fight wars. we continue to offer explanations that make sense to us and historically become quite baffleing an