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 then they hit a kind of cypress jam in the river.
And the engines snarl.
And he's not going anywhere.
And so the captain of the Arkansas has to make a very quick decision about whether he simply abandons the ship because the Union has an ironclad, the Essex, that is coming to engage, or whether he fires the ship.
And his decision is whether or not he will let the Union capture this very valuable piece of military technology, and he fires the ship.
That is, he explodes the ship.
His men evacuate to safety, and then he explodes the ship.
And there are a lot of lithographs and images of this that go in the Union newspaper.
Because with that ship disabled, then the Confederate attack on the Union ships collapses.
Yeah, and this is key.
There's a brilliant diarist, a woman named Sarah Morgan, very young, a girl, really, 16 years old in 1860, who leaves a brilliant diary.
Her father is a judge here in Baton Rouge.
It's actually called A Southern Girl's Diary, and it's been in print since the 1960s, if listeners are interested in war diaries or women's Civil War diaries in particular.
Hers is one of the best.
And she's on the riverbank and she sees the Arkansas fired.
And she says, there go all our hopes.
We knew we watched the explosion.
We watched shells detonating.
And we cheered when we saw the men run to safety there on the West Bank.
The crew gets off.
Showing 821–840 of 924 · page 42 of 47
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