Creating the John Brown Legend
Creating the John Brown Legend

Author: Janet Kemper Beck

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2009-04-07

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0786433450

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One of the triggering events of the Civil War helped divide a nation but also launched a cannonade of persuasive essays and propaganda. Early press reaction to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry ranged from indignant horror in the South to stunned disbelief in the North. Brown's supporters wielded great power with their pens: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Lydia Maria Child. This book explores the moment when literature and history collided and literature rewrote history. This volume features 30 photographs, maps, proclamations and broadsides and a detailed timeline of events surrounding the raid.

Midnight Rising
Midnight Rising

Author: Tony Horwitz

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2011-10-25

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1429996986

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011 A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale." Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours.

John Brown, Abolitionist
John Brown, Abolitionist

Author: David S. Reynolds

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-07-29

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0307486664

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history.Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.

John Brown
John Brown

Author: Merrill D. Peterson

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9780813921327

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Peterson gives readers John Brown in his own day, but he also shows how the flaming abolitionist warrior's image--celebrated in art, literature, and journalism--has helped him shed some of his infamy to become a symbol of American idealism and fervor. 14 illustrations.

John Brown's Spy
John Brown's Spy

Author: Steven Lubet

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-11-13

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0300180497

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Describes the story of the man who was entrusted with all of the details of John Brown's plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859 and how he was hunted down for a $1,000 bounty and tried as a spy.

Blacks on John Brown
Blacks on John Brown

Author: Benjamin Quarles

Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press

Published: 1972

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Benjamin Quarles brings together for the first time a broad range of statements by blacks on Brown from his day to the present -- from William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass (who explains why he did not join the raid) to Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Lerone Bennett. The twenty-four selections include personal letters, eulogies, resolutions, reminiscences, sermons, poems, essays, newspaper editorials, and assessments by historians. The heroic image of Brown that they project was a factor in creating the legend of an immortal John Brown, a continuing source of inspiration for black leaders. The selections reveal much about America, black protest, and the relationship between blacks and whites over the past century. -- From publisher's description.

Five for Freedom
Five for Freedom

Author: Eugene L. Meyer

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 161373574X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of eighteen raiders descended on Harpers Ferry. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house where they barricaded themselves until a contingent of US Marines battered their way in on October 18. The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown's fighters were five African American men—John Copeland, Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby, Lewis Leary, and Osborne Perry Anderson—whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and who, even today, are little remembered. Only Anderson survived, later publishing the lone insider account of the event that, most historians agree, was a catalyst to the catastrophic American Civil War that followed. Five for Freedom is the story of these five brave men, the circumstances in which they were born and raised, how they came together at this fateful time and place, and the legacies they left behind. It is an American story that continues to resonate.

Meteor of War
Meteor of War

Author: Zoe Trodd

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2004-07-16

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781881089391

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few men in American history have been at once as glorified and maligned as John Brown. From his attack of the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, as part of a scheme to free the slaves, Brown has been called a saint and sinner, rogue and redeemer, martyr and madman. Brown rebelled against the American government, and he murdered men in Kansas in order to end the murderous institution of slavery. He denounced war, but made war on his government in order to end an existing war for slavery. This anthology, which presents Brown's writing and diverse responses to his life and raid, offers a lens through which to analyze these tensions and contradictions. Extensive introductions to every source offer a close reading of language and provide full historical and biographical background.

Cloudsplitter
Cloudsplitter

Author: Russell Banks

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2011-08-10

Total Pages: 837

ISBN-13: 0307367533

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A triumph of the imagination, rich in incident and beautiful in its detail, Cloudsplitter brings to life one of history's legendary figures--John Brown, whose passion to abolish slavery lit the fires of the American Civil War in a conflagration that changed civilization.