A Fresh Look at the Lives of Civil War Soldiers Reveals the High Price of Diversity.

The article the degree of comradeship among Union soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. The book "Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War," by Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn uses statistics to look at the social cohesion of military units and concludes that groups of men who shared similar traits (i.e. religion, occupation, etc.) were likely to be more solidified than units made up of men from disparate backgrounds. The book seeks to answer a question about why more soldiers did not desert from the Union Army and they found that personality characteristics had the most influence over whether or not a soldier would choose to leave the army.