John Brown

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?

Looking back at the short but deep friendship of John Brown and Harriet Tubman, who gave their lives to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown and the historical novel.

The righteous rage of John Brown.

The militant abolitionist's execution set a precedent for armed resistance against the federal government with implications for those who had condemned him.

In 1908, Eugene Debs eulogized John Brown as America's "greatest liberator," vowing the Socialist Party would continue Brown's work. We publish it here in full.

Atlantic writer William Phillips conducted three interviews with Brown before Brown's fateful raid on Harper's Ferry.

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?

To address these atrocities and treat Jewish victims, survivors, and families with dignity, we must confront Israel’s subjugation of Palestine.

In the mid-19th century, a pro-slavery minority used violence to stifle a growing anti-slavery majority, spurring their opposition to respond in kind.

Newspaper announcements from 1859 reveal how some Richmond slaveholders organized to protect the institution of slavery.

Southern pro-slavery states weren't the only states calling for disunion before the Civil War erupted.

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, political activism was full of empty gestures done in bad faith. Abolition called for true heroism.

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

Lewis Leary, who volunteered in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, later inspired poetry by Langston Hughes.

A pardon request for Aaron Dwight Stevens argues that slavery-related crimes are null.

We may not be in the midst of a war today, but the progress of democracy in this country is still tied to the rights of its most vulnerable citizens.

For decades, slaveholders were powerfully committed to the Union. That changed when Washington stopped protecting their interests.

They force us to remember the worst parts of our history.