Muscatine Tours Podcast

Dan Clark devotes this show to the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry (now West Virginia) on October 16, 1859, in an attempt to end slavery. Dan will take part in a conference there this week http://www.johnbrownharpersferry.com/ and visit a friend, a circuit court judge whose work takes him to the courthouse where the 1859 judge pronounced sentence after a fast trial. Brown and several comrades were executed a few blocks away. In his newspaper column this week, the Hon. John C. Yoder writes of the versions of the story he learned growing up in Kansas and going to school in Iowa. "When I moved to Harpers Ferry 25 years ago, however, I began to hear other sides of the story about John Brown," he writes. "Those other perspectives included a belief that his violence and fanaticism may have actually hindered and embarrassed, rather than helped, those who favored the abolition of slavery at the time." John says he supports a proposal to restore the original courtroom wher