New Books in Intellectual History Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
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Oct 12, 2025 Historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean from Louisiana State University dives deep into how 17th-century English history influenced the American Civil War. He reveals that both Northerners and Southerners interpreted the English Civil Wars to justify their positions, with Confederates aligning themselves with Cavaliers and abolitionists drawing from Cromwell. Sheehan-Dean discusses how these historical analogies shaped wartime strategies and narratives, offering a fresh perspective on the power of history in contemporary conflicts and cautioning against misleading parallels.
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How Americans Learned 17th-Century History
- Nineteenth-century Americans mostly learned about the English Civil Wars through popular histories, not formal coursework.
- Macaulay and Carlyle shaped public understanding and analogies used during the U.S. Civil War.
A Bipolar View Of The English Past
- Americans saw the English Civil Wars in bipolar terms: royalists (hierarchy) versus parliamentary (liberty).
- That binary let 19th-century actors map themselves onto Cavaliers or Cromwellians to justify political positions.
Cavaliers, Cromwell, And Real-Life Followers
- Southern slaveholders long identified with royalist Cavaliers and invoked that past to defend hierarchy and order.
- Radical abolitionists embraced Cromwell; John Brown famously carried a biography of Oliver Cromwell with him.
