John Brown dedicated his life to abolishing slavery, helping countless slaves escape—but his violent tactics remain controversial even today.

Each June, in the small town of Osawatomie, Kansas, local residents hold a pageant to select a high school girl to be the new "John Brown Queen." The unlikely namesake of this pageant was ...

To spend some time, she and her cohorts in the carriage sang a few of the war songs so popular those days, among them, "John Brown's Body," which contained the provocative words, "John Brown's ...