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 over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · What Made America? Victory in the Civil War · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

not strictly to look back and imagine a past that was somehow peaceful or uniform or homogenous, which of course it never was, but to sort of begin from that democratic premise and continue working to fulfill that and to satisfy that.

in a way that is inclusive as Lincoln envisioned it and not exclusive.

And this, of course, gets us to debates about birthright citizenship, as you mentioned in the 14th Amendment and the things that are happening now.

But as Lincoln understood, you know, this is a promise forward, not just an obligation to the past.

Yeah.

And I think the most dangerous part of thinking about it, as you say, in terms of modernity, is the inevitability.

that, well, obviously, we were going to move to a more democratic system and that, you know, we would not continue to have senators elected by state legislatures in these sort of secret cabals.

Clearly, women were going to get the right to vote.

None of that is clear in the mid-19th century.

And so, as a kind of lesson in history, it is that we have to attend very closely to how and when historical change happens and not to presume that it naturally produces us, but that where we are, the world that we inhabit, is produced by...

contingency and effort and struggle and uncertainty.

And all of that is present, of course, in the Civil War all over.

And so it's a very useful opportunity for just trying to unpack that and recognizing we're in one of those moments now.

The future is uncertain, as it always is.

And what it requires is us being scrupulous about the kind of world we want to make and committing ourselves to that and being willing to argue and work for it.

What are you working on now, Iron?

I'm curious.

So I've actually started another project that would look at sort of the question that we're talking about today in a way, that is, what does the Civil War actually accomplish?

And I'm looking through the lens of the Sherman brothers.

So both William Tecumseh Sherman and then his lesser known brother, John Sherman, both

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