What the Irish Taught Civil War Americans

Join us as Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean delves into his book Fighting With the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War. In this talk, he will examine how Union and Confederate armies in the Civil War drew on differing interpretations of Irish history, particularly in shaping their views on how the war should end—whether with generosity or punishment.

Dr. Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies and Chair of the History Department at Louisiana State University. He specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern history. He is also the author of the award-winning The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia, and, most recently, Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.

Member reception is at 5:00pm

$10 - general public

$5 - with member code