Video: John Brown’s Vermont with Amy Godine

October 16, 2021: On this anniversary of the radical abolitionist John Brown’s nation-shaking raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, independent historian Amy Godine talked to us about John Brown’s reverberative meaning in and for Vermont — both in his own time, and in antiquarian and modern memory.

Godine curated and wrote the traveling exhibition, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, about an abolitionist-founded Black farm settlement in New York’s Adirondack mountains where Brown and his family settled in 1849. Dreaming of Timbuctoo is viewable at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, NY, and at the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury through October.

The Black Woods, Godine’s narrative history of this abolitionist-founded colony, will be published by Cornell in 2023. She is a longtime contributor to Adirondack Life magazine and has been researching and speaking about Black, ethnic, labor, and migratory history in northern New York for forty years.

The talk was made possible thanks to the support of the Vermont Humanities Council.