Discovering The Civil War: "Midnight Rising: John Brown's Raid and the Coming of the Civil War"

Monday, November 7, 2011

Speaker: Tony Horwitz, writer and author

In 1859, in an effort to arm and free slaves in Virginia, John Brown led a daring strike on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. His raid shocked the nation and sped it toward disunion and war. Tony Horwitz, Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer and author of four nonfiction bestsellers, including the recently published “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War,” will examine the reasons Brown and his biracial band resorted to violence and whether they were terrorists or visionaries.

For many years, Horwitz worked as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.