Horwitz traces Brown’s unlikely rise from farmboy to revolutionary. He also introduces the remarkable cast brought together by Brown’s magnetism and moral fervor, including his lovelorn teenage daughter, a freed slave desperate to liberate his wife from bondage, a dashing poet who spies inside Virginia, and a Transcendentalist schoolmaster who organizes the “Secret Six” to covertly supply money and guns.

Brown moves from Bleeding Kansas to a mountain hideout in Maryland where the raiders spend a tense summer preparing to attack. When the raid comes, it sparks savage fighting that presages the Civil War, including a lightning charge by troops under Robert E. Lee. Though wounded and captured, Brown galvanizes the North with his courage and eloquence and drives an enraged South closer to secession. The raid also helps elect Abraham Lincoln and bring on the war that fulfills Brown’s gallows prophecy, that the sin of slavery could only be purged with blood.  While the book is rooted in the 19th century, it addresses many issues--including race, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism--that still resonate today.

As a Wall Street Journal reporter, Horwitz received the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. Perhaps best known to historian s for Confederates in the Attic (1998),  he is also the author of four nonfiction bestsellers, including A Voyage Long and Strange (2008), Blue Latitudes (2002), and Baghdad Without a Map (1991). Co-sponsored by NYS Writers Institute. There will be a book signing immediately following the talk.

FRIDAY, November 18th
Lunch Keynote
On Friday Temple University historian Heather Ann Thompson presents the conference keynote, Rescuing and Remembering Attica. Included among Professor Thompson's numerous publications are the forthcoming Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy as well as Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press, 2001) and the edited work " Speaking Out With Many Voices: Documenting American Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s."

Professor Thompson is writing the first comprehensive history of the Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its legacy. To recover this story Thompson has spent the last seven years immersed in legal, state, federal, prison, and personal records related to the Attica uprising and its aftermath (some never-before-seen) located in archives, governmental institutions, and various individual collections around the country and the world. With these varied and rich resources she seeks to recapture the full, dramatic, gripping, multi-faceted, and complex story that was Attica, and hopes to underscore for readers everywhere this event's historical as well as contemporary importance.

Closing Plenary
On Friday afternoon noted author Kirstin Downey will join us to discuss the life of Frances Perkins -- based on her 2009 book, Frances Perkins: Architect of the New Deal. Frances Perkins, witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, wrote the state's fire safety code, and helped steer the state industrial commission from 1918-1932 before moving to the national stage. The nation's first female cabinet secretary, her ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare legislation in U.S. history. Today, her name is almost unknown. Downey will explore this woman's remarkable life-and her surprising drop into obscurity.

An award-winning author at the Washington Post for 20 years, Kirstin Downey is a business reporter whose work illuminates the human implications of financial trends. From 2005-07 her reporting led the coverage of the growth of risky new mortgages that threatened our economic system. She shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Washington Post staff coverage of the Virginia Tech slayings. Her book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2009 by the Library of Congress, the American Library Assn, and the LA Times, among others.

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Researching New York brings together historians, researchers, archivists, museum curators, librarians, graduate students, teachers, Web and multimedia producers, and documentarians to share their work on New York State history. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at resrchny@albany.edu. We look forward to your participation at this year's Conference.