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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And Johnson then allows that order to basically be overturned.
So it's awfully hard to predict the downstream consequences, but a more genuine commitment to enfranchising and offering.
Formerly enslaved people, an opportunity to economically succeed could have transformed things.
No, it would have required, as you say, a sort of level of commitment and foresight from white Northerners.
That's that's hard to imagine.
And also kind of generosity towards, again, a community that is formerly enslaved people towards whom they didn't feel particularly generous to begin with.
And so in that sense, there's a degree to which we set up reconstruction as a success or failure as a kind of false framing of what was actually happening at the time.
Much as we might like there to have been the opportunity for this, I'm not sure it's 100%, it's reasonable to assume.
Well, I think, I mean, in a way, you know, we talk a lot about the lost cause and the difficulties of kind of getting a clear view of the Civil War, given the predominance of the lost cause, this false narrative.
Reconstruction still suffers under that in ways that we sort of have cleared the cobwebs out of the Civil War memory problem.
The memory of Reconstruction itself is in some ways more contested still in the white South than the Civil War is.
Hmm.
And, you know, I mean, I run into people, certainly older people, if you're in your 70s or 80s, who had gone to high school and college in the South that were taught a vision of reconstruction that, you know, could have been written in 1900, 1890 about, you know, quote, Negro misrule.
The good example of this is the marker, the historic marker in Fairfax.
I mean, it's our Colfax in Louisiana that was put up in the 1950s that said on this spot, 150 black men and three white men died in an event marking the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.
Wow.
And that marker stood until 2021.
I was actually there when they removed it.
And today there's now a much bigger marker that actually explains Colfax.
But that is only literally in the last handful of years that we have managed to kind of retell that story.
Showing 281–300 of 924 · page 15 of 47
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