USA HISTORY

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM(1890 1919)

THE SPANISH AMERICAN WAR

[SOURCES]
True or false:More Americans were killed by disease than by battles.

(A) ** True

(B) False

EXPLANATIONS BELOW

Concept note-1: -Throughout America’s first 145 years of war, far more of the country’s military personnel perished from infectious diseases than from enemy action.

Concept note-2: -The American Civil War is the conflict with the largest number of American military fatalities in history. In fact, the Civil War’s death toll is comparable to all other major wars combined, the deadliest of which were the World Wars, which have a combined death toll of more than 520, 000 American fatalities.

Concept note-3: -Twice as many Civil War soldiers died from disease as from battle wounds, the result in considerable measure of poor sanitation in an era that created mass armies that did not yet understand the transmission of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus, and dysentery.

Concept note-4: -The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history.