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
that s wha gets them in. my concern is why do they stay in. so the question is confederate psistence. in additio to taking a look at going into some of the diaries and other things, you take a quantitative look at who fought. what types of things did you come up with there? first thing is the standard argue system it s a rich man s war and poor man s fight. really a rich man s feig. rich counties overwhelmingly send hig numbers of men. in terms of correlation. you get a very strong correlation between wealth and slave holding and enlistment. theor wealth a county has the more slaves a place has the more men go t fight some rich men are actually over represeed in the army as posed to under represented. the other statistical element thats important is desertion. i found overa a 15% rate of desertion in confederate forces 10% because some those g back the desertion peaks in 62. the traditional argue system that it peaks late in the war. it steadily gs up and in fact what i f
to be meeting with in terms of the labor leaders. richard trumka of the afl-cio, eliseo medina, lloyd blankfein, and arnie sorenson, among others. so those are just a few of the folks with whom he will be meeting this afternoon. of course, time is of the essence, thomas. the president believes he has about a year, year and a half, to really make movements on some of these other policy issues, like gun control, like immigration reform. as you know, he was in minnesota yet, pressing for new gun safety measures. so i think this is a tactic you re going to see this white house continue with over the next several weeks. when you say time is of the essence, because of 2014, the midterms coming up. and when we talk about time, we know we have just a week to go until the state of the union address. but we re also learning that the president is going to deliver the remarks this afternoon in response to the problem that s looming about the sequester. a short-term fix to that. can we expect to