Brown’s legacy is complicated, to say the least. Men of the time who whole-heartedly approved his hanging just as sincerely revered his memory.
John Brown
When Eugene Debs eulogized John Brown
While he was campaigning for president in 1908, the candidate of the Socialist Party of America stopped in Harper’s Ferry and eulogized John Brown. Jacobin has published Debs’s remarks. Here is a taste: As I stand here on this spot […]
Could the battle over abortion in the states result in another “Bleeding Kansas?”
Michael Waldman writes about the recent Supreme Court gun ruling: The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday striking down a New York gun law isn’t just the most significant ruling on the Second Amendment in a dozen years — it may be the […]
Should evangelicals claim John Brown?
Louis De Caro, a church history professor at Alliance Theological Seminary in New York City, thinks so. Here is a taste of his piece at Christianity Today: Despite efforts on the part of some historians to portray him as heterodox, […]
What did the congressman know about the insurrection?
What did William Seward (NY) and Henry Wilson (MA) know about the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry? Here is Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardian: The House select committee on the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol, according to chairman […]
The ever-usable John Brown
Here is Yale graduate student Bennett Parten at History Today: …John Brown became an American sensation, a source of both fear and enchantment. Slaveholders reviled him; abolitionists wept for him, tolled bells in his honour and came to see him […]