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Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Teaching Fields: Nineteenth-century U.S. history, Southern history, Civil War and Reconstruction and Digital history. Research Interests: His research has focused on the intersection of political and social history. In particular, my scholarship explores how the Civil War was produced by and spurred changes in people’s conceptions of democracy, their communities, and their families. His book Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, published by the University of North Carolina Press, examined the relationship of non-slaveholders to the Confederacy. In this book, he argues that the North’s hard war and emancipation policies bolstered white southerners’ commitment to the Confederacy, which strengthened rather than weakened over the course of the conflict. His book suggests that we must understand motivations for war dynamically; as wars evolve so do the ways that participants understand them. He has also edited several volumes that explore different aspects of the conflict. His next individual book project continues my exploration of the relationship between war and society from a broader perspective. The project consists of two parts. First, he is investigating the moral, political, and legal frameworks that shaped how Confederates and Federals waged war. In particular, he is analyzing how and when each side sanctioned the use of lethal violence or other harsh measures (property seizure or destruction, imprisonment, banishment, and hostage-taking) against non-combatants. Both North and South sought to justify their own behavior by referencing historical claims to just war and portrayed their opponents as having violated those precepts. Assertions of moral authority governed the behavior of both sides even as each considered or committed deliberate atrocities. Understanding the nature of the Civil War and its place in the global history of civil conflict and violence requires a careful accounting of how its participants conceptualized the relationship between war and morality. Accordingly, he will also be working to situate the practices of both sides in the U.S. Civil War in the context of other civil and national conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Like the U.S. Civil War, diverse conflicts around the world witnessed people making national claims in the midst of violent assertions of self rule. An analysis of the connections and disjunctures among them promises an important precedent for understanding the efforts of modern democracies to respond to claims to autonomy perpetuated through acts of violence.

  • Black Bangor

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2997634-black-bangor?from_search=true   Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880-1950 (Revisiting New England) by Maureen…

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  • Why Confederates Fought

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487153. Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia by Aaron Sheehan-Dean   In the…

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