perfidy

I hope you all subscribe to the Atlantic, which is still the best magazine in the USA (with the possible exception of Cook's Illustrated, but that's not quite as general interest, y'see.). If you do, you can access this link. In the most recent issue of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens reviews a new biography of John Brown that argues that Brown was more important than previously thought in the struggle for abolition. Rather than being a crazy outlier, he and his band of dedicated fanatics were the ones who convinced the South that not all Yankees were effete jellyfish unwilling to fight for their principles. An interesting and intriguing thesis, but one I will need to read the book (soon!) to really pass judgement on.

But the internet being the internet, opportunities for greater things abound. The Atlantic was founded as a Progressive magazine in the Antebellum era and as a consequence have a rich trove of important and groundbreaking stories to share. (If you didn't know, Julia Ward Howe first published the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in its pages.) What the Atlantic have done is to tie Hitchens' review of the John Brown biography to several pieces published in the magazine over the past 150 years, giving us sort of a capsule Atlantic-style historiography of John Brown's legacy.

The Atlantic helpfully supply links to two articles from their 1872 issues by Franklin Sanborn, a Massachusetts businessman who was one of a half dozen secret financiers of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. From 1879 come three interviews of Brown by William Addison Phillip, who met Brown in Kansas in the 1850s. Finally, from 1922 comes Gamaliel Bradford's piece, "John Brown," which attempted to cut through the myth and expose the man there behind. Taken together, subscribers can get a detailed view of how John Brown's legend and legacy has been preserved in the pages of one of the country's oldest and most staunchly progressive (in the old, good sense) magazines.

This is what the internet is for. Holy crap.