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Home | Events Archive | The Long Civil War: Battle Exposure and Anti-Black Racism in the US South
Seminar

The Long Civil War: Battle Exposure and Anti-Black Racism in the US South

  • Series
    Research on Monday
  • Speaker(s)
    Federico Masera (University of New South Wales, Australia)
  • Field
    Empirical Microeconomics
  • Location
    Erasmus University Rotterdam, Campus Woudestein, Polak 2-04
    Rotterdam
  • Date and time

    September 18, 2023
    11:00 - 12:30

Abstract This paper studies the effect of the Civil War, one of the major events in US history, on racial discrimination. We focus on soldiers' battle exposure and investigate the political and cultural consequences on local communities. For this purpose, we construct a new dataset on the universe of soldiers enlisted in the Confederate army and their war experience. Exploiting within-state variation, we show that cities with a larger share of soldiers exposed to bloody battles have greater support for racially conservative parties, discriminatory laws, and more violence against Black Americans. The effects start immediately after the Civil War and persist until today.