For the final project, I would like to use the “Union Army Recruits in Black Regiments in the United States, 1862-1865” dataset by Jacob Metzer and Robert A. Margo (available here). Given my interest in American military history, I think this dataset will provide a great opportunity to do a bit of analysis on force composition. Some of the questions that I think could shape such analysis are:
- How are enlistments in such units geographically and temporally situated?
- What percentage of recruits in any given year enlisted within their birth state?
- What percentage enlisted outside of their birth state?
- Is there a perceivable trend correlating between enlistment location and the temporal progress of the war?
- Is there any discernible trend relating to rates of enlistment and the temporal progression of the war (i.e. were there more recruits in 1865 than in 1862)?
- Did date of enlistment have any effect on the saturation of given ranks?
- What was the relative proportion of ranks?
- How did pre-enlistment occupation affect rank?
- Is there any discernible trend between occupation/skill level and battlefield mortality or desertion?
One reply on “Module 6: Final Project Proposal”
This is all good and should be very do able. One thing to keep in mind will be the racial component: you’ll need to do at least a bit of secondary research on how all-black units were deployed: were they sent into battle less than white units? Were they given higher risk deployments? The related publications https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/9426/versions/V1/publications would be a good place to start for this.
If you haven’t looked at it already, the Mapping Occupation project http://mappingoccupation.org/ will be useful for comparison, since it looks at the racial distribution of units deployed during Reconstruction.