this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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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, as 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.
i grew up in Virginia and we had an entire year in our standards of learning dedicated to learning about Nat Turner and John Brown. we might not anymore after that parents' rights group in loudoun county brought the phrase "critical race theory" to the national table
Also Virginian, yeah I remember learning about it, although I don't recall it being all that much. My parents are from WV and I know they learned about The Battle of Blair Mountain too, and I'm pretty sure I've heard they don't teach it anymore.
One thing that's crazy to me is how WV has largely become anti-union despite this history. They want more coal mining and fewer union, even though the only reason they view coal mining as even halfway decent for making a living is because unions saved them from the coal company exploitation.
we didn't learn about blair mountain. this is a great tragedy. my elementary school serves an old mining community. my farm growing up had an entrance to the old mine on it. our teachers had an old miner come in to talk to us about how it used to work and the environmental impact. he started telling us about how he volunteered for the civil war, got on a train to head north to fight before they shuffled him out of the room. they said he was old and confused. it took me 20 years to realize he was telling us the realist thing anyone had ever told us. there was a living monument to what it takes to make the world better in our classroom, right in front of me. he'd taken a lever action rifle, got on a train, and headed to blair mountain. he was ready to die. he told his wife and his children goodbye because he didn't want his children to be abused the way he was. he didn't know if they would ever see him again, but he knew if he did nothing the world would remain static, and the status quo would be sustained.
the outcome of that battle was weekends. we have weekends where we don't have to work because of him and men like him. that's what it took to get that basic dignity given to us. and i'm sure it weighs heavily on him that he survived. that he saw so many of his friends cut down by the pinkertons. if he were alive today, i wonder what he'd think about the pinkertons filling in for the striking hospital police in town. perhaps i'm glad he's not alive to see the inheritors of the world he and his friends built through their own bloodshed voting to undo all that, to go back to how it was before.
but it's also an inspiration. our grandfathers and great grandfathers fought fascism because it's what they had to do. now in the name of them, and for me and you, i'm gonna fight fascism too.
Women had a lot to do with the labor rights we enjoy today.
100%. black women especially
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.
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.
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.