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
brutal riots, murder, massacres, really, in both Memphis and New Orleans, very high profile, that lead white Northerners to kind of shockingly realize this process is not going to be easy, and it's going to require a very active role for the federal government to manage this process.
I mean, it's true, and it's one of the many ironies of the Civil War era, the first and most paramount being that white Southerners secede to protect slavery and in doing so ensure its destruction.
That is, they produce the exact opposite outcome.
And if the goal was always maintaining white supremacy in a kind of white-dominated social order in the South, accepting the kind of modest terms of reconstruction that white Northerners were promulgating in 1865 would have been a much wiser course.
And this is part of the unpredictability of history and certainly of reconstruction, which is white southerners think they can kind of buffalo through this or kind of make their way through.
And doing so produces this dramatic and unexpected response from white northerners, mostly reacting to the efforts of black southerners to achieve something like, you know, a political voice, economic opportunity in the South.
And so, you know, I mean, one of the things that I really emphasize to my students is how unpredictable and uncertain this process is.
And that's not just us looking back.
At the time, people sort of week to week aren't sure at all about, and even very astute observers are continually surprised by the direction that events take.
It is.
And it's important for readers to remember that the percentage of Black Americans living in the North is tiny.
In most communities, less than 1%.
And really, it's concentrated in the big cities of the Northeast, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, have very large and active Black communities.
But 90% or more of the Black Americans live in the South.
And so it's not just an experiment in biracial communities.
democracy in the South.
It's really the first American experiment, as you put it.
And there is great apprehension.
White Southerners, certainly those elites who had led the South into the Confederacy, are deeply suspicious of poor white Southerners
Never mind black southerners.
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