Booknotes: Fighting with the Past

New Arrival:

• Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean (UNC Press, 2025).

A work of "comparative intellectual history," Aaron Sheehan-Dean's Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War explores the ways in which Civil War-period Americans "used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present." In this case, the reference is to Britain's bloody internal conflicts that played out concurrently with the expansion of English settlement of North America.

From the description: "(N)ineteenth-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." According to Sheehan-Dean, factions that emerged during America's Civil War came to identify with those of their clashing forebears. "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."

The field of Civil War memory centers itself upon interpreting the ways in which the postwar populations of both sections, from Reconstruction through to today, came to reckon with the national past. In contrast, Sheehan-Dean takes a novel tack by shifting the posts two hundred years in the other direction. More: "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 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."