Midnight rising John Brown and raid that sparked the Civil War
In this book the author tells the tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war. Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched...
| Main Author: | Horwitz, Tony, 1958- |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Henry Holt and Co.,
2011.
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| Edition: | 1st ed. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
In this book the author tells the tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war. Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, this work portrays Brown's uprising revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale." This book travels antebellum America to deliver both a historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided, a time that still resonates in ours. |
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| Physical Description: |
xii, 365 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780805091533 080509153X |
| Author Notes: |
He was an education reporter for The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana from 1983 to 1984 and a general assignment reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia from 1985 to 1987. He joined The Wall Street Journal in 1990 as a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East. He and his wife Geraldine Brooks won the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award in 1990 for their coverage of the Persian Gulf war. He returned to the United States in 1993 and was assigned to The Journal's Pittsburgh bureau. He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his accounts of working conditions in low-wage jobs. He later wrote for The New Yorker on the Middle East before becoming an author of nonfiction books. His first book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, was published in 1998. His other books included Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, and Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. He died on May 27, 2019 at the age of 60. (Bowker Author Biography) |