Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I'm not reflecting on sort of the Southern will or Confederate will thesis here necessarily.
But it is kind of surprising because 12 years later, Southerners are still kind of tenaciously and often violently resisting Reconstruction.
They're reciprocal and they're related.
And so at the end of the day, of course, it's both and rather than either or.
But if we're sort of sequencing them in terms of significance, I would put white resistance at the top of that list.
So Reconstruction is one of the great moments of possibility as American historians tell it.
That's partly because American historians don't agree on what reconstruction should be, just as people at the time didn't.
So to challenge the form of your question a little bit, our ability to say it was a failure or it might have succeeded presupposes a very particular kind of outcome.
That is that there were clear goals articulated.
Through the Civil War, Lincoln says, I want the white Southerners to return to their normal national allegiance.
That's a small part of post-war reconstruction.
Radicals by the end of the war want Black Americans now to have full citizenship.
Does that include the right to vote?
It doesn't until the 14th Amendment is passed in 1868 and then the 15th Amendment finally in 1870.
That is the terms of what Reconstruction are shift over time.
The question of whether there could have been a, just to kind of go as broad as we can, a biracial democracy in the South, I'm genuinely pretty skeptical about whether that was possible.
And I'm also skeptical that most white Northerners actually wanted that.
most white Northerners have, or I would say all white Northerners have been absorbing the same racial science that underlay slavery through the 1830s and forties and fifties.
And while the willingness of black men in the U S colored troops to participate in the Northern armies and fight for union victory helped convince them that
Black men were both more capable and should be given fairer terms in the post-war period.
Showing 221–240 of 924 · page 12 of 47
← Previous
Next →