FIVE FOR FREEDOM: THE NEW PODCAST

Eighteen months after publication of FIVE FOR FREEDOM: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army, the book tour continues!

In late September, I was interviewed by Sonja Williams, an award-winning writer and producer of documentaries and  professor of communications at Howard University, for a podcast on the Biographers International Organization  website.  The hour-long interview, edited into 22.29 compelling minutes, is now live on the BIO website.

October was also a busy month for FFF, with the publication of  two of my stories on the 160th anniversary of the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry, in the Washington Post and on the Zocalo Public Square website.  On October 16, I was honored to present the story at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. There I was also in conversation with the distinguished scholar and journalist Herb Boyd. Not long before, I brought FFF to the Rock Creek Civil War Roundtable at the National Park Service’s Rock Creek Nature Center in Washington, DC.

The story of these five heroic men, overshadowed for 160 years by their martyred commander, continues to resonate. It is not a story of the past but, as a Park Service ranger told me, a story from the past that is relevant in the present. I look forward to sharing the story with more audiences in 2020, including on April 17 at the  Unitarian Church of All Souls on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.

RISING TIDES revisited:  In June 2017, Indiana University Press published this important book by my friend Jack Wennersten and co-author Denise Robbins.  I blogged about it, but it did not then get the attention it deserved.  The subtitle, “Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century,” underscores the immediate impacts of climate change that is no longer an abstraction but increasingly affects larger portions of the globe, in remote places and also close to home. My blog appeared June 26, 2017.  I urge you to read it, ponder it–and buy Rising Tides!  Wennersten fans may have missed his earlier work.  It’s quite an oeuvre, as they say.  To learn more, click here.

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