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The article discusses the collective effort to edit and produce the periodical "Frederick Douglass' Paper" when the paper's founder and editor, African American journalist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, sought temporary asylum in Great Britain in the wake of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. The article also examines the collective nature of the broader Black press in the U.S. in the mid-19th century.

Abolitionist John Brown remains a cultural touchstone over 160 years after his execution for leading the Harpers Ferry Raid in October 1859, largely because that event and Brown's behavior after it played a part in leading the nation into civil war. To understand that legacy and his role in sparking the Civil War, this article examines the discursive field that animated around Brown within the context of the racial sensorium of his time. We argue Brown still attracts interest because he was a distinctive antebellum racial figure who catalyzed major shifts in the country's racial sensory landscape by offering a mode of radical whiteness grounded in white mobility, the use of violence, electrifying words and deeds, and shockingly bold intimacies with Black people. Ultimately, by examining the discursive field that surrounded Brown from his time in Kansas to after his execution, we demonstrate how his radical sensibilities shifted the somatic politics of racial confrontation in the antebellum period and show that John Brown became an amplifying cultural force through which both Northerners and Southerners felt the question of slavery in new ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although John Brown has been labelled in many ways, historians have not explored his connection with filibustering. This essay considers John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry within that context, focusing specific attention on how Republicans turned Brown into a filibuster by comparing his actions to William Walker and Narciso López. In the immediate aftermath of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Republicans faced the charge that they had inspired Brown by their alleged embrace of abolitionism. Republicans countered this by linking Brown to filibustering, arguing that Democrats had only recently championed William Walker. Brown's expedition was unlawful, Republicans argued, but it was no different than Walker's invasion of Nicaragua or López's forays into Cuba. By making this argument, Republicans shifted the blame for Harpers Ferry upon Democrats. In distancing themselves from Brown, however, Republicans demonstrated that they were far from radicals who were secretly bent on subverting the institution of slavery. Indeed, their argument that John Brown was a filibuster helped Republicans legitimize themselves as defenders of law and order, men who firmly rejected the use of armed violence and who would work to make sure that men were prosecuted for leading armed rebellions, whether in the United States or abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines spiritualism and the representation of abolitionist John Brown in spiritualist press. It explores the political nature of a religious movement using the spiritualist reception to Brown in spiritualist periodicals as a case study including the response to the issue of violence in the aftermath of his raid at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. It investigates the afterlife of Brown as viewed by spiritualists and as it related to the enslavement of Africans.

'Dare you Meet a Woman' examines how black women exhibited their willingness to take on forceful and even violent action to dismantle the institution of slavery. Black resistance was central to abolitionism and black women were essential to the movement. This essay argues that their activism should be examined as the politics of protective violence. The politics of protective violence explains black women's employment of force to protect themselves and their communities and ultimately promote the overthrow of slavery. Beginning with the Christiana Resistance in 1851 and culminating with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this essay examines the bookends and high points of free and fugitive black women's responses during key turning points of the 1850s. In sum, black women violently resisted the Fugitive Slave Law and anti-black oppression. Moreover, black women leaders contributed significantly to the acceleration of violent sectional tensions and, ultimately, the American Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of the public memory of Toussaint Louverture in American radical abolitionism movement in the U.S. The author contends that public memory of Louverture influenced the American abolitionist movement throughout the nineteenth century, but more in the 1850s many abolitionists abandoned their hopes of the natural and peaceful demise of the institution of slavery. He asserts that the radical abolitionism movement of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 reveals the iconic stature of Louverture among American abolitionists, illuminating an important trajectory.

Examines John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry during the Civil War. Treatment of the Harpers Ferry raid and of Brown by historians; Association of the concept of martial virtues to the raid; Capture of Brown by Colonel Robert E. Lee; Myth of Brown's suicidal stand; Analysis of Brown's conduct during the raid and during his capture.

The article presents two letters written by abolitionist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn to abolitionist Gerrit Smith and his wife Ann C. Smith that discuss the attack at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia by radical abolitionist John Brown.

John Brown is usually not considered to have been a terrorist, and even recent analyses of his activities consider him to be a guerrilla fighter or insurgent in his activities in Kansas. Brown, however, meets the criteria of a terrorist more than a guerrilla fighter when his activities in the Kansas Territory are considered. His raid on Harpers Ferry, however, is more in line with guerrilla operations or insurgent activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the 1959 controversy over whether and how to commemorate the centennial of abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. I argue that the controversy arose because commemorating Brown's raid challenged prominent U.S. public memories of the Civil War that excluded slavery and the continued existence of white supremacy. I analyze the discursive fields into which the centennial commemoration entered: the heroic, patriotic, and unifying narratives of the war championed by the national organizations tasked with commemorating the Civil War centennial, and discourses of the civil rights movement and the black press that demanded a repudiation of white supremacy and the recognition of African Americans as equal citizens. Ultimately, I contend that the rhetoric that surrounded the Harpers Ferry raid commemoration sheds light on how the civil rights movement not only challenged white supremacy in its conservative form, but also pushed against the moderate and liberal manifestations of white supremacy that were embedded in the commemoration of the Harpers Ferry raid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article urges historians to study rumors and prophecies as temporal counterparts of historical memories. To conduct such research, it proposes an analytical framework inspired by Koselleck's (2004) ‘horizons of expectations’ and superior mirages called looming, and applies it to rumors and prophecies surrounding John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry. When people responded to uncertain knowledge about the event, they spread rumors that darkened and bloodied American visions of the future. As apocalyptic prophecies crystallized and spread through national media channels, the act of forecasting empowered unlikely prophets and the stories they told. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the treatment of Shields Green and John Copeland, two insurrectionists that participated in the raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, led by abolitionist John Brown. Topics include the treatment of the black men arrested compared to the white men arrested at the raid and the precedent set by the U.S. court case Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The article discusses the 1882 visit to Topeka, Kansas by Mary A. Brown, the widow of the abolitionist John Brown, upon invitation from the Kansas State Historical Society (KSHS) Secretary Franklin G. Adams. The collective memory of Kansas residents of John Brown's 1859 Raid in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, including the role that Mary Brown's 1882 visit to Topeka played in John Brown's historical legacy, John Brown's role in the abolitionist movement and Kansans' perspective that he defended the rights of African Americans, is discussed.

Scholars have debated why the New England Transcendentalists enthusiastically supported John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Building on recent interpretations that emphasize the close ties between Brown and figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, this article argues that the antislavery career of second-generation Transcendentalist Thomas Wentworth Higginson reveals fundamental connections between antebellum America’s most important intellectual tradition— Transcendentalism—and its most controversial event—Harpers Ferry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, examining his views on political indifference. It comments on the relationship between his political thought and his political action, exploring economic aspects. The author particularly reflects on Thoreau's participation in the U.S. antislavery movement, noting his views on the 1850 U.S. Fugitive Slave Law and abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The concept of "minding one's own business" is explored.

This essay explores how divergent interpretations of John Brown's alleged "madness" in the aftermath of the Harper's Ferry Raid defined the meaning and import of his actions for the Republic's increasingly unstable social and political order. It argues that popular characterizations of Brown illustrate that "madness" can serve a number of rhetorical functions in the civic sphere. The essay first explores the popular etiology of insanity in antebellum America. It then argues that prevailing views of insanity in the mid-nineteenth century invited three metonymic interpretations of the origins of Brown's "madness"—and hence of the larger significance of his actions: Brown as pariah, Brown as pawn, and Brown as prophet. A concluding section discloses how these competing views may enrich our understanding of "madness" as a recurrent trope in American political and social controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11th attack, historians have interpreted John Brown as an American terrorist. This article seeks to correct that misinterpretation and situate Brown within the context of guerrilla warfare. While Brown did employ terrorist tactics, this is a common guerrilla action. Further, Brown himself and his contemporaries saw him as a guerrilla fighting in the revolutionary cause of antislavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the application of postcolonial theory to U.S.-American history and culture and argues that such an application helps us to rethink postcolonialism’s relationship to the concept of the nation-state. While current postcolonial theory has become disillusioned with models of the postcolonial nation, which frequently seem to mirror imperialist structures, American Studies’ application of postcolonial theory to American cultures of imperialism is arguing for a rethinking of the relationship between post-colonialism and nation. On the territory which emerged as the contested space of the U.S.-American nation, we encounter various competing imagined communities during all historical phases, making impossible the clear temporal or spatial demarcation of coloniality from post-coloniality. U.S.-American history thus necessitates a rethinking of nationhood not only as a spatially, but also as a temporally flexible concept. To provide an example, I draw on John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry which contributed to the tensions that led the nation into the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Brown's October 16, 1859, raid at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, created a flashpoint in the United States, sparking what can be called a "Crisis of Americanism." As this article shows, evidence of this discourse appeared frequently in extensive southern and northern newspaper coverage of his raid, trial, and subsequent hanging on December 2 as editors on both sides of the slavery issue accused one another as well as prominent Americans of disloyal, treasonous behavior. This unhealthy, often shrill, debate, which helped lead to the Civil War in 1861, hardly promoted democratic ideals or best served the nation's values and founding ideals. Instead, such incendiary rhetoric only added to the increasing division of two Americas, both of which laid valid claims to being rightful heirs to the legacy of the United States' founding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]