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2007

American Studies

Marshall University

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From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni Jan 2007

From Man To Meteor: Nineteenth Century American Writers And The Figure Of John Brown, Amanda Benigni

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 2, 1859, John Brown laid siege to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, then Virginia, in an effort to seize weaponry which he planned to employ in a full scale slave insurrection. From the moment he entered the public eye during his brief trial and execution, John Brown and his legacy were figured and refigured by prominent writers and thinkers of the time. The result of this refiguring was an image under constant metamorphosis. As the image of John Brown cycled through the Civil War, it moved further and further from the actual man and became a metaphor …