Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Bleeding Kansas
Without the material support of a half-dozen prominent northerners known as the Secret Six, John Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago may well have never occurred.
ON OCTOBER 17, 1909, a small group of former abolitionists quietly gathered in an imposing brick house in Concord, Massachusetts, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s historic raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, then a part of Virginia.
Tempers flare and violence reigns in the pre–Civil War battleground of Kansas.
On January 25, 1859, a small wagon expedition of three whites and 13 blacks stole away from Lawrence, Kansas, on the first leg of a journey that would take the African Americans to the free state of Iowa, far from Kansas and the ever-present threat of kidnapping by slave traders.
Two hundred years after his birth, Americans still revere him as a martyr and loathe him as a fanatical murderer. What was he?
When mudslinging in Congress led to actual bloodshed
Our recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers out in force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship,” as when, at the end of the impeachment process, The New York Times declared that “Americans yearn for a Congress that ca
Senator Douglas’ act is verified, at last, by first-hand testimony
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