Aaron Sheehan-Dean's "Fighting with the Past"

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and the current chairman of the History Department. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century US history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. His work as a historian focuses on the US Civil War and its meaning for Americans and the world.

Sheehan-Dean applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War, with the following results:

Page 99 of Fighting With the Past explores the contest between radicals and conservatives in the Civil War North over the changes wrought by the war. That contest, I argue, reflected and derived from their contrary readings of the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The New York Herald, a conservative pro-war paper quoted a recent history of the earlier conflict to celebrate what they saw as Oliver Cromwell’s effective balancing of competing interests. After quoting the editorial, I conclude: “In this telling, Lincoln could emerge as a wise Cromwell, resisting the radicalism of the abolitionists even as he suppressed secession.”

Page 99 probably includes more quotation than is typical of the book as a whole, but it actually reveals my narrative strategy quite effectively. I am primarily interested in explaining various elements of the American conflict: how Southerners justified secession; why Northerners resisted it; how Northerners disagreed over emancipation and infringements on civil liberties; why the war ended with generous reconciliation rather bitter recrimination. Because Americans referred back constantly to “the Civil War” (meaning the seventeenth-century one), I wrote the book in a way that braids together explanations of the English Civil War, the American Civil War, and how participants in the latter used the former to navigate through the conflict.

I realize now that taking a page (99, for instance) out of context might leave the reader somewhat confused about which conflict was the book’s subject, but that position actually illustrates one of my underlying points. We rely on the past to make sense of the present so often that, to quote William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.” Civil War Americans understood their experience by refracting it through the prism of English history, just as we do today when we invoke “the Civil War” in the midst of partisan political disputes.

Visit Aaron Sheehan-Dean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue