The raid on Harper's Ferry was an intent by John Brown, who was an abolitionist, to initiate a slave revolt in 1859 by taking control on the federal arsenal located in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
The two groups that were outside the arsenal were:
- <em>John Brown's "group of 22"</em>. This group of men was supposed to be supported abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. However, none of them showed up in the scene, as Tubman fell ill and Douglass was doubtful of a victory.
- <em>A group of US Marines</em> led by Colonel Robert E. Lee.
The attempt was unsuccessful, resulting in the defeat of Brown's group by the US Marines.
The western settlement continued to force native americans off their land.
When Athens began to emerge as a Greek city state in the ninth century, it was a poor city, built on and surrounded by undesirable land, which could support only a few poor crops and olive trees. As it grew it was forced to import much of its food, and while it was near the centre of the Greek world, it was far from being a vital trading juncture like Corinth. Its army was, by the standards of cities such as Sparta, weak. Yet somehow it became the most prominent of the Greek city states, the one remembered while contemporaries such as Sparta are often forgotten. It was the world's first democracy of a substantial size (and, in some ways, though certainly not others, one of the few true democracies the world has ever seen), producing art and fine architecture in unprecedented amounts. It became a centre of thinking and literature, producing philosophers and playwrights like Socrates and Aristophanes. But most strikingly of all, it was the one Greek city that managed to control an empire spanning the Aegean sea. During the course of this essay I will attempt to explain how tiny Athens managed to acquire this formidable empire, and why she became Greece's most prominent city state, rather than cities which seemed to have more going for them like Sparta or Corinth.
William Clark
Lewis and Clark remember???
