“John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost today.” –W.E.B. Du Bois In his 1928 epic poem John Brown’s Body, Stephen Vincent BenĂ©t named the problem of John Brown in America’s historical memory: The law’s our hardstick, and it measures well, Or well enough when there are yards […]
David Blight
David W. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in AmericanMemory and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War.
The Enduring Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, David Levering Lewis. Henry Holt, 715 pages, $35.00. David Levering Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 forW.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. The Du Bois portrayed in that volume is a brilliant youth and later a powerful idealist who wrote […]

