George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Memory of War: The Seventeenth Century and the US Civil War

Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, the Fred C. Frey Professor at Louisiana State University, will deliver the 2022 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lectures.

Thursday, November 3, 5pm EDT, Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: Why the Civil War Happened

Friday, November 4, 5pm EDT, Mann Assembly, 103 Paterno Library: Managing Civil War

Saturday, November 5, 4pm EDT, Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library: What Civil Wars Mean

Dr. Sheehan-Dean’s lectures will explore how Americans’ historical consciousness shaped the Civil War. In particular, he will focus on how people remembered and analogized the English Civil Wars (or the Wars of the Three Nations) with their own conflict. Northerners and Southerners both made use of history, albeit in contrasting ways, and Northerners argued among themselves.  From the war’s origins to its final moments, Americans drew on history to contest the legitimacy of rebellion, how to fight a civil conflict, and what the meant.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies and chairman of the History Department at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is 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.

The 2022 Brose Lectures are co-sponsored by the Richards Center and Penn State University Libraries.

Read more about the Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture and Book Series