John Brown in Historical Memory: From Pottawatomie to Harpers Ferry to Posterity

This is the story of John Brown, and of the Age he both represented and stood as symbol of opposition to. Through the linear path of narrative biography, a non-linear narrative of the epistemological and ethical formulation of the Age is told. It is a story about metaphor and power, about illusions and the fate that illusions can become through the stories that define us, and about the nature of historical memory in the culture that created John Brown - both the man he was, and the myth he became: The last myth that the West ever produced.