Aaron Sheehan-Dean

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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 · Why Did Reconstruction Fail? · 24 Aug 2026 podcast

And that these two things are sort of two sides of the same coin.

And, you know, one of the difficult things for students really to hold in mind, because it's easy to just tell the story of the violence, but the precursor to that violence is that, in some respects, Reconstruction works.

That Black Southerners are able to build their communities, and the fact that

that they could persevere through those long years of the Jim Crow era, beginning in the late 1870s, certainly in the 1880s, with the imposition of Jim Crow laws, until you get, finally, by 1964, a Civil Rights Act.

That is possible because of the institutions they built in Reconstruction.

The civic, the familial, the social institutions.

As you said, the schools and the churches are the anchor and the bedrock for this.

federal government just abandons them.

And so it's really within those communities that they have to persevere.

And they do so because that wartime generation comes out emboldened to make a new a new order for themselves.

Yeah, the 1873 depression is the worst one of the 19th century.

There had been basically every 20 year depressions and there will be another terrible one in 1893.

But that one both distracts and disorients people in the North.

It, of course, reduces federal revenue.

so that you have fewer resources with which you can implement the policies that might be needed to protect and expand reconstruction.

I think the other important sort of economic dimension of this to think about is actually ideological, which is that the creation of the Republican Party was predicated on the idea of free labor.

And in the 1850s, that was juxtaposed with slave labor.

And as we move into an industrial order in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, free labor comes to be

honestly, just a very hollow ideology.

That is, if all you are promised is the right to sign a contract without being compelled to do it, it doesn't mean that most workers really have a fair shake in this emerging industrial economy.

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