The Afterlife of John Brown

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Anguish None Can Draw

Chapter 2 Black People’s Ally, White People’s Bogeyman: A John Brown Story

Chapter 3 “The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community

Chapter 4 John Brown, Bearded Patriarch

Chapter 5 “Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song”: John Brown and Public Poetry

Chapter 6 Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and the Transcendent Intellectual

Chapter 7 Transforming the “Madman into a Saint”: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History

Chapter 8 Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle

Chapter 9 Transatlantic Spartacus

Chapter 10 W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown : Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a Socialist Politics

Chapter 11 “I see your mouth calling / before the words arrive”: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Soul and Body of John Brown” and 1930s America

Chapter 13 More Heat than Light: The Legacy of John Brown in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter