John Brown's Body

John Brown is one of the most controversial fugure in American history, a leader who turned to violence to achieve what he and many others saw as a noble aim: ending slavery. To some he remains a martyr, to others a dangerous fanatic. A 2005 biograhy by David Reynolds examines Brown's life and his continuing legacy.

Listen Up

• The Talking History site at the University of Albany has this interview (14:50) with Reynolds. NPR has a shorter interview (8:18).

• The Talking History site also has 2 items of interests: This 5/19/2005 lecture (38:38) by David W. Blight, the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, at Yale University, and a reading of Brown's last speech (4:02) by Orson Welles.
  

Write Now

• In his lifetime and even today, Brown has been a polarizing figure, someone about whom most people have an exceptionally strong and divergent opinion: in this case, hero-martyr or scoundrel. It is often difficult to write about such figures, since there are so many readers who are going to disagree with your assessment. One helpful tactic is to try to consider such a figure from two different sides, easier fror writers who are not partisans themselves; another, is to consider two or more such figures in the same paper.
• Brown was at once a terrorist to many and a hero to others. How can this be?
• Many people claim they have no use for history as it is all in the past. How does John Brown's life challenge such a view?

Read On

• More from Wikipedia.com
• A Plea for Captain John Brown by Henry David Thoreau
• Jacob Lawrence's print series on John Brown