guilty verdict. Brown was undoubtedly doomed from the start, but McGinty demonstrates how the abolitionist was repeatedly short-changed, especially due to the haste with which he was brought to trial. Largely stifled in his ability to obtain the kind of representation he sought, the same haste also undercut the highly qualified attorneys who finally made it to his side in the last hours of his short but well-publicized trial. Notwithstanding his having been rushed to judgment, the reader shares McGinty's closing impression that John Brown, however imperfectly, made the best possible use of his trial in the end. In a kind of inspired declaration, Brown's address to the court (which McGinty identifies as a "remarkable" allocution) was the real moral climax of the trial (226). "Viewed in the long lens of history," the author concludes, "it is clear that John Brown was not really on trial in Charlestown" because "[he] turned the accusation against him into an accusation against slavery" (287). For the first time, in John Brown's Trial, we are given a front row view of Brown the prisoner-not as a victim, but as a thoughtful if not frustrated defendant, coming to terms with the limitations of justice for himself as well as the slave. Brown is rushed to the gallows, but not before turning his own judgment back upon his accusers, many of whom would shortly lose life, home, and treasure by rushing themselves into a treasonous war against the federal government.
Focusing on three riots of the World War II era – those of Beaumont (Texas), Detroit, and New York's Harlem – this essay examines the rumours that sparked these disturbances to uncover the gendered ideologies that underlie racial violence. In these rumour narratives, women appear as either rape victims or tortured mothers, while men appear as either depraved rapists or noble protectors. The deployment of these images helped forge a defensive collective identity that facilitated the outbreak of violence. Because racial and gender ideologies were intimately linked, the author argues, race riots must be analysed through the lens of gender in order to be fully understood.
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