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Title details for John Brown Still Lives! by R. Blakeslee Gilpin - Available

John Brown Still Lives!

America's Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change

by R. Blakeslee Gilpin
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From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's violent history, its checkered progress toward racial equality, and its resistance to substantive change. Tracing Brown's legacy through writers and artists like Thomas Hovenden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Penn Warren, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and others, Blake Gilpin transforms Brown from an object of endless manipulation into a dynamic medium for contemporary beliefs about the process and purpose of the American republic.
Gilpin argues that the endless distortions of John Brown, misrepresentations of a man and a cause simultaneously noble and terrible, have only obscured our understanding of the past and loosened our grasp of the historical episodes that define America's struggles for racial equality. By showing Brown's central role in the relationship between the American past and the American present, Gilpin clarifies Brown's complex legacy and highlights his importance in the nation's ongoing struggle with the role of violence, the meaning of equality, and the intertwining paths these share with the process of change.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 14, 2011

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9780807869277

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781469602608
      • File size: 3658 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781469602608
      • File size: 3658 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      September 15, 2011

      In this, his first book, Gilpin (United States Study Ctr., Univ. of Sydney, Australia) tracks the uses, and abuses, of John Brown's image from Brown's own self-promotion to recent artists' renderings. In doing so, he argues that each generation had its own takes on Brown as they wrestled with the meanings of racial equality and social change and the instruments--especially violence--used to realize change. By examining the works of biographers from James Redpath to W.E.B. DuBois, poet Stephen Vincent Benet, the Southern Fugitive writers such as Robert Penn Warren, and artists as varied as Thomas Hovenden, John Steuart Curry, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker, Gilpin shows the malleability of Brown's symbolic power and his persistent appeal as the metaphor for antislavery, heroism, and fanaticism. VERDICT Gilpin's choices are somewhat idiosyncratic, so the full range of (especially more recent) renderings of Brown the person and the symbol does not get covered, but his analysis is pointed and pertinent. University students will especially profit from his resurrections of Brown.--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

      Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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