A01=Aaron Sheehan-Dean
abolitionists
Abraham Lincoln
analogies in history
Author_Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Category=NHB
Category=NHK
Cavaliers
Charles I
civil rights in wartime
Confederates
democracy
despotism
England
English Civil War
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
hard war
historical consciousness
historical interpretation
historiography
history
Ireland
just war
memory
Northern conservatives
Oliver Cromwell
peace
preemptive war
Puritans
rebellion
royalists
slavery
Thomas Macaulay
U.S. Civil War
Union
United States
uses of history
war rhetoric
whiggish history
Product details
- ISBN 9781469690742
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland.
Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Sheehan-Dean’s surprising discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.
Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Sheehan-Dean’s surprising discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University.
