Aaron Sheehan-Dean - Böcker

American Horizons presents an opportunity to view the nation's history as more than a mere sequence of events for students to memorize. Although adhering to a familiar chronological organization, its narrative style and structure provide the flexibility of shifting emphasis from time to time to the global aspects of American history. Although the story of the United States is always at the center, that story is told through the movement of people, goods, and ideas into, within, or out of the United States. This unique approach provides a fully integrated global perspective that seamlessly contextualizes American events within the wider world.

American Horizons presents an opportunity to view the nation's history as more than a mere sequence of events for students to memorize. Although adhering to a familiar chronological organization, its narrative style and structure provide the flexibility of shifting emphasis from time to time to the global aspects of American history. Although the story of the United States is always at the center, that story is told through the movement of people, goods, and ideas into, within, or out of the United States. This unique approach provides a fully integrated global perspective that seamlessly contextualizes American events within the wider world.

Winner of the Jefferson Davis AwardWinner of the Johns Family Book AwardWinner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award“A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War.”—Gregory P. Downs, author of After AppomattoxShiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg—tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is often thought of as the first “total war.” But Aaron Sheehan-Dean argues for another interpretation.The Calculus of Violence demonstrates that this notoriously bloody war could have been much worse. Military forces on both sides sought to contain casualties inflicted on soldiers and civilians. In Congress, in church pews, and in letters home, Americans debated the conditions under which lethal violence was legitimate, and their arguments differentiated carefully among victims—women and men, black and white, enslaved and free. Sometimes, as Sheehan-Dean shows, these well-meaning restraints led to more carnage by implicitly justifying the killing of people who were not protected by the laws of war. As the Civil War raged on, the Union’s confrontations with guerrillas and the Confederacy’s confrontations with black soldiers forced a new reckoning with traditional categories of lawful combatants and raised legal disputes that still hang over military operations around the world today.In examining the agonizing debates about the meaning of a just war in the Civil War era, Sheehan-Dean discards conventional abstractions—total, soft, limited—as too tidy to contain what actually happened on the ground.

Rebels and Regimes presents a global view of the nature of violent resistance throughout the nineteenth century. The volume's breadth and scope reveal commonalities and differences among regimes and insurgents in their different contexts, offering a view that the participants themselves never had. The collection is composed of ten essays, each focused on a specific conflict or period of colonial overreach: imperialist efforts against Caribbean maroons, the Peninsular War, the Second Seminole War, the Taiping Rebellion, the American Civil War, Russian imperial expansion, British imperial expansion in both India and South Africa, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Dutch-Aceh War. Using a comparative approach to show how established regimes fought rebels, the volume emphasizes the importance of race, political rhetoric, and historians' paradigms in understanding nineteenth-century violence. As the collection demonstrates, comparing violence and histories of violence at a global level provides significant historiographic value. Case studies of two or three conflicts abound, but the increasing web of connections—economic, cultural, political, and military—across national communities in this era demands a more comprehensive framing. At an analytical level, the volume lays bare the usefulness and limitations of traditional concepts used to study war, from Eastern and Western ways of war to regular and irregular fighting methods to symmetric and asymmetric warfare. A comparative approach at this scale drives home the characteristic savagery of established regimes, the intentionality in guerrilla violence, and the historian's need to keep the present and the past in view. The essays also remind us of the importance of military thought and violence as one of the axes of globalization in the nineteenth century, something that scholars of globalization have rarely recognized. Andrew Fialka and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Military History, Global History, and the Mid-Nineteenth Century" Marcus Nevius, "Little Wars and the Imperial Competition for Sovereignty in the Maroon Caribbean During the Age of Revolutions" Charles Esdaile, "'War to the Knife?': Spanish Guerrillas Reappraised" Samuel Watson, "The Complex Character of the Second Seminole War" Zhenman Ye, "On the March to Victory: Irregular Warfare and the Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864" Joseph Beilein, "The Word Is Not the Thing: A Short Biography of 'Irregular Warfare' in the American Civil War" Ian Campbell, "Colonial Warfare as Irregular Warfare: Conflict on the Imperial Russian Borderlands During the Nineteenth Century" Gavin Rand, "'The Surf That Marks the Edge and Advance of Civilization': Frontier Wars in Colonial South Asia" Vitor Izecksohn, "The Campaign of Cordilleras in the War of the Triple Alliance, 1869–1870: Resistance or Suicide?" Jacob Ivey, "'A Pretorian Guard of Savages': African Troops and the Implementation of Formal and Informal Order in Nineteenth-Century Natal" Josh Gedeacht, "Harnessing Mobility for Colonial Counterinsurgency: The Case of the Dutch-Aceh War in Southeast Asia, 1873–1904"

This title discusses the motivations for continuing the fight. In the first comprehensive study of the experience of Virginia soldiers and their families in the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean captures the inner world of the rank-and-file. He challenges earlier arguments that middle- and lower-class southerners gradually withdrew their support for the Confederacy because their class interests were not being met. Instead he argues that Virginia soldiers continued to be motivated by the profound emotional connection between military service and the protection of home and family, even as the war dragged on.

An innovative global history of the American Civil War, Reckoning with Rebellion compares and contrasts the American experience with other civil and national conflicts that happened at nearly the same time—the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Polish Insurrection of 1863, and China's Taiping Rebellion. Aaron Sheehan-Dean identifies surprising new connections between these historical moments across three continents. Sheehan-Dean shows that insurgents around the globe often relied on irregular warfare and were labeled as criminals, mutineers, or rebels by the dominant powers. He traces commonalities between the United States, British, Russian, and Chinese empires, all large and ambitious states willing to use violence to maintain their authority. These powers were also able to control how these conflicts were described, affecting the way foreigners perceived them and whether they decided to intercede.While the stories of these conflicts are now told separately, Sheehan-Dean argues, the participants understood them in relation to each other. When Union officials condemned secession, they pointed to the violence unleashed by the Indian Rebellion. When Confederates denounced Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant, they did so by comparing him to Tsar Alexander II. Sheehan-Dean demonstrates that the causes and issues of the Civil War were also global problems, revealing the important paradigms at work in the age of nineteenth-century nation-building.A volume in the series Frontiers of the American South, edited by William A. Link

This volume narrates the major battles and campaigns of the conflict, conveying the full military experience during the Civil War. The military encounters between Union and Confederate soldiers and between both armies and irregular combatants and true non-combatants structured the four years of war. These encounters were not solely defined by violence, but military encounters gave the war its central architecture. Chapters explore well-known battles, such as Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as military conflict in more abstract places, defined by political qualities (like the border or the West) or physical ones (such as rivers or seas). Chapters also explore the nature of civil-military relations as Union armies occupied parts of the South and garrison troops took up residence in southern cities and towns, showing that the Civil War was not solely a series of battles but a sustained process that drew people together in more ambiguous settings and outcomes.

This volume explores the political and social dimensions of the Civil War in both the North and South. Millions of Americans lived outside the major campaign zones so they experienced secondary exposure to military events through newspaper reporting and letters home from soldiers. Governors and Congressmen assumed a major role in steering the personnel decisions, strategic planning, and methods of fighting, but regular people also played roles in direct military action, as guerrilla fighters, as nurses and doctors, and as military contractors. Chapters investigate a variety of aspects of military leadership and management, including coverage of technology, discipline, finance, the environment, and health and medicine. Chapters also consider the political administration of the war, examining how antebellum disputes over issues such as emancipation and the draft resulted in a shift of partisan dynamics and the ways that people of all stripes took advantage of the flux of war to advance their own interests.

This volume analyzes the cultural and intellectual impact of the war, considering how it reshaped Americans' spiritual, cultural, and intellectual habits. The Civil War engendered an existential crisis more profound even than the changes of the previous decades. Its duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The chapters in the third volume distinguish the varied impacts of the conflict in different places on people's sense of themselves. Focusing on particular groups within the war, including soldiers, families, refugees, enslaved people, and black soldiers, the chapters cover a broad range of ways that participants made sense of the conflict as well as how the war changed their attitudes about gender, religion, ethnicity, and race. The volume concludes with a series of essays evaluating the ways Americans have memorialized and remembered the Civil War in art, literature, film, and public life.

The Cambridge History of the American Civil War provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the American Civil War. With contributions from over seventy-five leading historians of the Civil War, the three-volume reference work investigates the full range of human experiences and outcomes in this most transformative moment in American and global history. Volume 1 is organized around military affairs, assessing major battles and campaigns of the conflict. Volume 2 explores political and social affairs, conveying the experiences of millions of Americans who lived outside the major campaign zones in both the North and South. Volume 3 examines cultural and intellectual affairs, considering how the War's duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The volumes conclude with an assessment of the legacies of the Civil War, demonstrating that its impact on American life shaped the country in the decades long after the end of the War.

A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil WarFeatures contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarshipCovers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory

This volume narrates the major battles and campaigns of the conflict, conveying the full military experience during the Civil War. The military encounters between Union and Confederate soldiers and between both armies and irregular combatants and true non-combatants structured the four years of war. These encounters were not solely defined by violence, but military encounters gave the war its central architecture. Chapters explore well-known battles, such as Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as military conflict in more abstract places, defined by political qualities (like the border or the West) or physical ones (such as rivers or seas). Chapters also explore the nature of civil-military relations as Union armies occupied parts of the South and garrison troops took up residence in southern cities and towns, showing that the Civil War was not solely a series of battles but a sustained process that drew people together in more ambiguous settings and outcomes.

This volume explores the political and social dimensions of the Civil War in both the North and South. Millions of Americans lived outside the major campaign zones so they experienced secondary exposure to military events through newspaper reporting and letters home from soldiers. Governors and Congressmen assumed a major role in steering the personnel decisions, strategic planning, and methods of fighting, but regular people also played roles in direct military action, as guerrilla fighters, as nurses and doctors, and as military contractors. Chapters investigate a variety of aspects of military leadership and management, including coverage of technology, discipline, finance, the environment, and health and medicine. Chapters also consider the political administration of the war, examining how antebellum disputes over issues such as emancipation and the draft resulted in a shift of partisan dynamics and the ways that people of all stripes took advantage of the flux of war to advance their own interests.

This volume analyzes the cultural and intellectual impact of the war, considering how it reshaped Americans' spiritual, cultural, and intellectual habits. The Civil War engendered an existential crisis more profound even than the changes of the previous decades. Its duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The chapters in the third volume distinguish the varied impacts of the conflict in different places on people's sense of themselves. Focusing on particular groups within the war, including soldiers, families, refugees, enslaved people, and black soldiers, the chapters cover a broad range of ways that participants made sense of the conflict as well as how the war changed their attitudes about gender, religion, ethnicity, and race. The volume concludes with a series of essays evaluating the ways Americans have memorialized and remembered the Civil War in art, literature, film, and public life.

The Cambridge History of the American Civil War provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the American Civil War. With contributions from over seventy-five leading historians of the Civil War, the three-volume reference work investigates the full range of human experiences and outcomes in this most transformative moment in American and global history. Volume 1 is organized around military affairs, assessing major battles and campaigns of the conflict. Volume 2 explores political and social affairs, conveying the experiences of millions of Americans who lived outside the major campaign zones in both the North and South. Volume 3 examines cultural and intellectual affairs, considering how the War's duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The volumes conclude with an assessment of the legacies of the Civil War, demonstrating that its impact on American life shaped the country in the decades long after the end of the War.

This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation's greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas caught in the legal snares of the Union's hard war to African Americans pursuing landownership in the postwar years. Essayists also explore how people contested and shaped the memory of the conflict, from outright silences and evasions to the use of formal historical writing. Other contributors use comparative and transnational history to rethink key aspects of the conflict. The result is a thorough examination of Gallagher's scholarly legacy and an assessment of the present and future of the Civil War history field. Contributors are William A. Blair, Peter S. Carmichael, Andre M. Fleche, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Caroline E. Janney, Peter C. Leubke, Cynthia Nicoletti, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Kathryn J. Shively.

This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation's greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas caught in the legal snares of the Union's hard war to African Americans pursuing landownership in the postwar years. Essayists also explore how people contested and shaped the memory of the conflict, from outright silences and evasions to the use of formal historical writing. Other contributors use comparative and transnational history to rethink key aspects of the conflict. The result is a thorough examination of Gallagher's scholarly legacy and an assessment of the present and future of the Civil War history field. Contributors are William A. Blair, Peter S. Carmichael, Andre M. Fleche, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Caroline E. Janney, Peter C. Leubke, Cynthia Nicoletti, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Kathryn J. Shively.

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland. Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Sheehan-Dean’s surprising discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland. Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Sheehan-Dean’s surprising discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.