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...
John Brown
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...
The Author’s Corner with Louis DeCaro, Jr.
Louis DeCaro, Jr. is Associate Professor of Church History at Alliance Theological Seminary. He has also kept a blog on John Brown since 2005. This interview is based on his new book, The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life...
Wilfred McClay on Historical Monuments
Whether you agree or disagree with him, Wilfred McClay is always thoughtful. If I see his byline at First Things or another conservative outlet, I will always read the article. As one of America’s best conservative historians (not a historian...
Historian H.W. Brands Paints a Scenario in Which the Battle Over Abortion Might Lead to Civil War
H.W. Brands‘s piece at The Washington Post is worth pondering. Here is a taste: Suppose Roe is reversed, and the states are allowed to restrict abortion as they see fit. Red states reduce access to abortion, in some cases nearly eliminating...
On Treason
I think it was Virginia Senator Tim Kaine who her first raised the “T” word in the wake of news that senior officials in the Trump presidential campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., met with a Russian lawyer in June 2016....
Reviewing “The Abolitionists”
A couple of days ago I did a post at The Anxious Bench on the new PBS three-part series on abolitionism. It focuses on the lives of five prominent nineteenth-century opponents of slavery: Frederick Douglass, Angelina Grimke, John Brown, William...
Reynolds Reviews Horwitz’s Midnight Rising
Over at The Wall Street Journal, David Reynolds, the author of a recent book on Harriett Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reviews Tony Horwitz’s new book on John Brown, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil...
Frederick Douglass and the John Brown Raid at Harper’s Ferry
Over at Past is Present, the blog of the American Antiquarian Society, librarian Tom Knoles tells us about the Society’s acquisition of a new Frederick Douglass letter. The letter was written from Canada on October 28, 1859, to Charles W....
The Legacy of John Brown
Today is the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. By sheer coincidence, I will be teaching the raid today in my U.S. Survey course. The New York Times features two op-ed pieces dealing with the event. In […]