To Purge This Land with Blood, Stephen B. Oates
To Purge This Land with Blood, Stephen B. Oates
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

To Purge This Land with Blood
A Biography of John Brown

Author: Stephen B. Oates

Narrator: Stephen R. Thorne

Unabridged: 17 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/18/2022


Synopsis

In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War.

Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown's actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good.

For more than a hundred years after Brown's hanging, biographies of him tended to be highly politicized—then came historian Stephen B. Oates's biography of Brown. Since its publication, Professor Oates's work has come to be recognized as the definitive biography of Brown, a balanced assessment that captures the man in all his complexity.

About Stephen B. Oates

Stephen B. Oates is the author of many books, including The Approaching Fury, With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, and Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the latter two books winning, respectively, the Christopher Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. Oates was a consultant and "talking head" in Ken Burns's Civil War series on PBS, and is a recipient of the Nevins-Freeman Award of the Chicago Civil War Round Table for lifetime achievement in the field of Civil War studies.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph on May 18, 2022

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

Goodreads review by John on July 02, 2016

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

Goodreads review by KatzeKet on August 10, 2021

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

Goodreads review by James on September 24, 2015

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