Hello and welcome to Prism of the Past, a semi-weekly series about historical events, people and situations, from the fascinating to the forgotten.

I'm the Illuminati and today we're going to be continuing by taking a look into our little

mini series all about the Confederacy.

Now in the first episode we talked about the Confederacy and the history of the Civil War and I would like to remind you about how I pointed out how long that war lasted.

It was a total of four years. However, the Confederacy is

still lauded and held onto as some sort of heritage by some southerners. In the

grand scheme of things, four years isn't that long and so into today's episode I want to put

the size and length of the Confederacy into perspective so that you can truly

understand it and so that's what we're going to try to accomplish today.

So let's get into it. of the

scholars debate the total number of Confederate soldiers in large part because we don't have a completely

accurate way to count all of them.

Best estimates come to somewhere between 750,000 to 1 million Confederate soldiers.

At least two of my sources suggest there were around 880,000 Confederate soldiers, so that's going to be the

number we're going to use today.

To put that into perspective, since gay marriage was legalized in the United States in 2014,

within five years of its legalization, 568,110 gay marriages have taken place in the

U.S.

That amounts to over 1 million gay or lesbian couples who have gone on to be married in the span of five years.

Meaning, more gay and lesbian people have gotten married in our country than fought for the Confederacy.

And as of 2019, marriage between same-sex couples lasted longer than the Confederacy

did too. To put things into even more perspective, let's talk about how many people

...