To Purge This Land with Blood
A Biography of John Brown

The best John Brown biography out there, this one does not disappoint. The author traces the subject's trajectory from growing up in northeast Ohio all the way to denouement at Harper's Ferry. Along the way, we learn that Brown was many things, but never a revolutionary, at least in his own eyes. I......more

At a time when even most abolitionists were strident racists, wanting nothing so much as to send blacks "back" to Africa, John Brown took seriously the biblical injunction that all men are brothers, as well as the language of the Declaration that "all men are created equal." To Brown slavery was ind......more

To Purge This Land with Blood is a biography about the life and actions of John Brown, detailing from his upbringing to his death by hanging after the raid of Harper's Ferry. Stephen B. Oates attempts to handle his character and actions as balanced as he could, given how much of a controversial figu......more

U.S. Highway 75 runs from just south of Winnipeg all the way to Dallas, bisecting the continental United States at the eastern emerald edge of the Great Plains. In northwest Iowa, it runs right through little Sioux Center, just two blocks from the house where we lived for a quarter century. So we dec......more