If I remember correctly, he was essentially the catalyst for the civil war right? Yet we don’t hear anything about him in schools. I was simply taught that the north was anti slavery, of course, the implication being they did it out of their good hearts. They never taught us that the south never fell in the first place, that they actually rose again and implemented apartheid instead of slavery and most of America supported it. Learning about a man who demanded the nation pay for its sins of slavery with blood goes against the narrative of the good republican who embraced the American value of human rights
If you live somewhere that they do teach it they tend to frame his as vaguely mentally unwell. If your high school history teacher is chill he’ll go beyond the shitty textbook and tell you John Brown was cool.
I vaguely remember people mentioning that it was through literature like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that set the war off which seemed silly on its face. There’s even a story of Lincoln meeting the author and going “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Then again US history in schools is just an absolute joke compared to the material reality of history so when people have no real frame of understanding the blowback from history, it starts in school stories like books setting it off rather than the South being terrified of further slave revolts akin to Haiti and John Brown’s uprising showed just how easily it might actually happen amongst a lot more.
If I remember correctly, he was essentially the catalyst for the civil war right? Yet we don’t hear anything about him in schools. I was simply taught that the north was anti slavery, of course, the implication being they did it out of their good hearts. They never taught us that the south never fell in the first place, that they actually rose again and implemented apartheid instead of slavery and most of America supported it. Learning about a man who demanded the nation pay for its sins of slavery with blood goes against the narrative of the good republican who embraced the American value of human rights
If you live somewhere that they do teach it they tend to frame his as vaguely mentally unwell. If your high school history teacher is chill he’ll go beyond the shitty textbook and tell you John Brown was cool.
In Ohio you learn he was the coolest mfer who ever lived
Edit: in elementary school we learned John Brown’s Body in music class
I vaguely remember people mentioning that it was through literature like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that set the war off which seemed silly on its face. There’s even a story of Lincoln meeting the author and going “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Then again US history in schools is just an absolute joke compared to the material reality of history so when people have no real frame of understanding the blowback from history, it starts in school stories like books setting it off rather than the South being terrified of further slave revolts akin to Haiti and John Brown’s uprising showed just how easily it might actually happen amongst a lot more.