Vicious Habits: Sexually Transmitted Infections among Black and White Union Army Veterans.

We analyze a random sample of 15,049 white veterans and 5,329 black veterans of the US Civil War examined by physicians between 1890 and 1906. We calculate a period prevalence of STI of 1.2-1.7% among whites and 4.2-8.0% among blacks, even though blacks and whites had almost identical prevalence of STIs in their wartime medical records. Furthermore, we find evidence that Board physicians were on the lookout for STIs among black veterans that could be used to justify denial of pension support. With or without STIs, blacks were rejected at roughly twice the rate of whites during this time period. Currently, racial disparities are even higher today than in this historical period, with blacks currently having a 5-15 times higher incidence than whites. We invite a critical reflection upon practices of screening and measurement systems to assess properly the degree to which racial prejudice may be part of these systems.

Wartime health shocks and the postwar socioeconomic status and mortality of union army veterans and their children.

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US Civil War (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger veterans who had been severely wounded in the war left the farm sector, becoming laborers. Consistent with human capital and job matching models, older severely wounded men were unlikely to switch sectors and their wealth declined by 37-46%. War wounds were correlated with children's socioeconomic and mortality outcomes in ways dependent on sex and paternal age group.

Intergenerational transmission of paternal trauma among US Civil War ex-POWs.

We study whether paternal trauma is transmitted to the children of survivors of Confederate prisoner of war (POW) camps during the US Civil War (1861-1865) to affect their longevity at older ages, the mechanisms behind this transmission, and the reversibility of this transmission. We examine children born after the war who survived to age 45, comparing children whose fathers were non-POW veterans and ex-POWs imprisoned in very different camp conditions. We also compare children born before and after the war within the same family by paternal ex-POW status. The sons of ex-POWs imprisoned when camp conditions were at their worst were 1.11 times more likely to die than the sons of non-POWs and 1.09 times more likely to die than the sons of ex-POWs when camp conditions were better. Paternal ex-POW status had no impact on daughters. Among sons born in the fourth quarter, when maternal in utero nutrition was adequate, there was no impact of paternal ex-POW status. In contrast, among sons born in the second quarter, when maternal nutrition was inadequate, the sons of ex-POWs who experienced severe hardship were 1.2 times more likely to die than the sons of non-POWs and ex-POWs who fared better in captivity. Socioeconomic effects, family structure, father-specific survival traits, and maternal effects, including quality of paternal marriages, cannot explain our findings. While we cannot rule out fully psychological or cultural effects, our findings are most consistent with an epigenetic explanation.

Union Army Veterans, All Grown Up.

This paper overviews the research opportunities made possible by a NIA-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the US Civil War. The sample contains extensive demographic, economic, and medical data from childhood to death. In recent years, a large sample of African-American soldiers and an oversampling of soldiers from major US cities have been added. Hundreds of historical maps containing public health data have been geocoded to place soldiers and their family members in a geospatial context. With newly granted funding, thousands of veterans will be linked to the demographic information available from the census and vital records of their children.