John Brown and Abolitionists

The Talking of History podcast from October 16th, 2005 about John Brown (linked from the 2005 archive page) provides background information about the life of John Brown, his work supporting the underground railroad, and the era of “bloody Kansas” preceding the start of the US Civil War.

David Reynolds, author of the recent book “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” was the guest on the program. I had only heard the textbook version of John Brown’s history before, which interestingly was written by mainly conservative authors following the end of civil war reconstruction and the years of Jim Crow laws and segregation leading up to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

I did not realize that American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled the strident words of Brown when he was in prison following his arrest after the attack and battle at Harper’s Ferry which launched our civil war. I had heard about Brown killing people in Potawatomi County near my own hometown of Manhattan in Kansas growing up, but did not know that in many ways the strident anti-slavery views of Brown planted the seeds for our later civil rights movement.

All the Talking of History podcasts are short (about 30 minutes) and very informative. I highly recommend them!