Using newly-digitized census data, a historian has reportedly revised estimates of the death toll from the Civil War and increased it to roughly 750,000, or an increase of more than 20 percent from previously accepted figures.
The new figure from J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, appeared in Civil War History, a journal that has called the new findings "among the most consequential pieces ever to appear" in its pages, the New York Times reports.
For more than 110 years, historians have accepted the numbers determined by Union Army veterans and amateur historians William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore: 618,222 total dead in the war, with 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South.
Hacker said he realized in 2010 that a recalculation could be made using newly available detailed census data presented on the Internet by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, the Times reports.
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