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Five for Freedom by Eugene L. Meyer
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Five for Freedom

The African American Soldiers in John Brown's Army

$20.99

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Narrator David Colacci
Length 9 hours 6 minutes
Language English
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Late on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of eighteen raiders descended on Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages and retreated to a fire engine house where they barricaded themselves until a contingent of US Marines battered their way in on October 18.

The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted and hanged. Among Brown's raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, are little remembered. Two—John Copeland and Shields Green—were executed. Two others—Dangerfield Newby and Lewis Leary—died at the scene. Newby, the first to go, was shot in the neck, then dismembered by townspeople and left for the hogs. He was trying to liberate his enslaved wife and children.

Of the five, only Osborne Perry Anderson escaped and lived to publish the lone insider account of the event that, most historians agree, was a catalyst to the catastrophic Civil War that followed over the country's original sin of slavery.

Eugene L. Meyer is an award-winning veteran journalist with eclectic interests but special passions for history, lifestyles, travel, real estate, and the Chesapeake Bay. He has been widely published in magazines, authored two books and was for many years a reporter and editor at the Washington Post. Since leaving the Post in 2004, Meyer has garnered more than a dozen awards for his work, and has had nearly fifty bylines in the New York Times. His first journalism job was as Washington bureau librarian for the old New York Herald Tribune, where he got to tag along with a White House reporter and watch the 1964 Civil Rights Act being signed into law.

David Colacci has been an actor and a director for over thirty years, performing coast-to-coast in lead roles of plays by a variety of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Sam Shepard to Steve Martin. He has worked as a narrator for over fifteen years, during which time he has read the works of such authors as Jules Verne, Henry Adams, John Irving, Michael Chabon, and John Lescroart. He has won AudioFile Earphones Awards, earned Audie nominations, and been included in Best of the Year lists by such publications as Publishers Weekly, AudioFile magazine, and Library Journal. David was a resident actor/director with the Cleveland Play House for eight years and has been artistic director of the Hope Summer Rep Theater since 1992. He currently lives in New York with his wife, narrator and actress Susan Ericksen, and his children, Mario and Elena.

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