For those who, like me, don’t know who John Brown is:
Fun fact, John Brown had chronic back pain from carrying around the weight of his massive balls.
Actual fact: Americans don’t learn about John Brown because John Brown’s existence highlights a lot of ugly truths about American history, the American people at the time, and how corrupted the core of the American experiment really is.
Actual fact: many Americans do learn about John brown in school, some of us even learned about Nat Turner. It’s downright common to learn about the Bloody Kansas affair as it was a major inciting incident of our civil war.
I wouldn’t be surprised though if I only learned so much about this because I grew up in a northern state that was one of the primary hotbeds of militant abolitionism (Ohio). We were home to Brown, Grant, and Sherman. We also learned that the fugitive slave act was an act of outright southern aggression on our right to free our fellow humans from their barbarous cruelty. Unfortunately ths state’s filled with dipshits flying the slavers’ rag these days talking about a heritage that certainly wasn’t ours.
I went to public school in Florida, and can tell you that neither of those names were ever brought to discussion. I only learned about John Brown from YouTube in my later twenties.
I went to public school in Florida and John Brown definitely came up in my history class. But that’s probably teacher and/or school district dependent, a friend of mine grew up in Ocoee and did not learn about the Ocoee massacre in school.
Americans don’t learn about John Brown
Horseshit.
I learned about him in public school 40 years ago, and so have both my kids more recently. My 8th grade class visited Harper’s Ferry.
edit: It would be accurate enough if you qualified it saying “some Americans dont learn about Brown.” Trying to make it a sweeping generalization is horseshit, presumably aimed at being inflammatory.
Depends on where you are in the country.
There is anecdotal evidence both ways mr horseshit. I never learned about John Brown, nor have my kids.
Actual fact: Americans don’t learn about John Brown because John Brown’s existence highlights a lot of ugly truths about American history, the American people at the time, and how corrupted the core of the American experiment really is.
John Brown is a very well known figure in the US, and widely taught about.
I live in a fairly blue state which tends to lean into highlighting the atrocities of the south during the Civil War (and all other eras to be frank) and I never learned about John brown until after high school
That’s weird, I grew up in ohio and we learned a lot about him, good bad and complicated. The civil war and fight against slavery was a huge part of state history for Ohio though.
Another fun fact: John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on!
Literally cannot see his name without the song going through my head.
I grew up in a town in Ohio where John Brown built a tannery (well before the Civil War). That building was fucking well-built and was still standing after more than a century of total neglect, but in the mid-70s some Republicans on the city council had it condemned and torn down over the space of three days, too fast for anyone to take legal action to stop it. Ironically, they initially couldn’t tear it down and had to bring in heavy-duty demolition equipment to bring it down; at one point they were considering explosives. Today it is - you guessed it - a parking lot, ironically enough for a walking trail along the river.
They probably had it torn down just out of general hatred of history, not because John Brown was an abolitionist. Back then, even though Republicans were still assholes, they generally had the same distaste for slavery as everybody else. It took the Reagan Revolution (which kicked off the 1980 election cycle in Philadelphia, Mississippi for some reason) to make racism cool again.
Behind the Bastards did an episode on John Brown for the Christmas anti-Bastard episode a few years ago, definitely worth a listen.
This is me, remembering I also didn’t learn about John Brown in school and being really pissed off about it
You can watch the show or read the book The Good Lord Bird for a fictionalization of his life, on my list of to-watch and to-read for sure. Anyone have any critical reviews on those as to accuracy?
Why go with the inferior product?
John Brown: This is the original Canadian design of the FN FAL. Weep at perfection.
lol what does your username mean?
It means I signed up for the original Kbin during the original reddit migration but then the developer got overwhelmed and the site was unuseable.
Then I signed up for the next one, supposedly run by a team to avoid such a meltdown. Then the head maintainer just took everything down and vanished.
So now I am on mbin, which is yet another fork of kbin.
deleted by creator
“These look great but you forgot to bring the ramrods.”
I’m right here and I like to party
“No that’s not a ramrod it’s a cleaning rod, you put a patch of cotton in the slot and run it down the bore.”
There was a book by Harry Turtledove called “The Guns of the South” which was about time-traveling white nationalists who go back in time and arm the Confederacy with AK-47’s in an attempt to get the South to win the Civil War, it’s actually a really good read, as far as Turtledove books go, it doesn’t get lost in the weeds too much.
Myself, a strategist: Mr. Toussaint Louverture, allow me to introduce you to the principles of agroforestry.
Harpers Ferry, WV is one of the most important National Parks in the entire country because of the history it contains. Highly recommend every American make the trek at some point in their lives.
Truly, one of the good ones. And his soul goes marching on!
Me: “John Brown? May I introduce Nat Turner. Mister Turner? I’d like you to meet John Brown.”
Should be required reading:
https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/nat-turner_9780810972278/
Oh fuck yeah.
Nat Turner was a John Henry mother fucker. Need to give him a god damn mini gun.
Self evident truths go “braaaaaaaat”!
I would go back in time and show him how to teabag his enemies
