Talk:John Brown

This is an excellent and thorough article. My only suggestion would be to add some reference to the song "John Brown's Body" that emerged after his death (for which new lyrics were written as the "Battle Hymn of the Republic").

---

John Brown is a pretty common name. Another one is mentioned in Victoria I of the United Kingdom.

Somebody needs to disambiguate this abolitionist John Brown that the song is about from Queen Victoria's John Brown that the movie Mrs. Brown is about and that I have a picture or two of that I want to post. -- isis 26 Aug 2002

Maybe we should disambiguate by year of birth, eg "John Brown (1859)". I don't think we'll ever come up with a satisfying, simple, intuitive qualifier. "John Brown (Queen Victoria)" is a bit long and unwieldy. -- Tarquin 13:52 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I was thinking of birth and death dates in parentheses and/or nationality: Scot and American. The only alternative I can see is to call one a lover and the other a fighter. -- isis

We have used nationality before. See Piet Hein (Denmark) and Piet Hein (Netherlands). Rmhermen 16:24 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I would much prefer to use dates to distinguish them, but that's not helpful in this case, because their lives overlapped [(1800 - 1859) for the abolitionist and (1826 - 1883) for the ghillie], so a person who knew the man they were looking up lived in the middle half of the 19th century would not be able to tell which it was. I think the nationality would be more helpful, but I'm not sure someone would know Victoria's John Brown was a Scot (if they just had his name mentioned in passing in some article about her), and Buchanan's John Brown could have been a Scot by birth (tho he wasn't).
So I would like to distinguish them by what they did, which raises the issue of how to label them. I was born and reared in Virginia, and the first epithet that comes to my mind for Buchanan's John Brown is "terrorist," which may not be NPOV enough, altho he WAS executed for treason and murder, and if that's not terrorism, what is? (Same problem with "fanatic," plus the other John Brown was gaga about Victoria, too, and so could merit that description.) I'd like to label Victoria's John Brown "ghillie" and then define that in the article, but that wouldn't help the person looking them up who didn't already know that term.
So the best I can suggest, thru gritted teeth, is "abolitionist" and "servant." Can anyone else, please, please, please, do better? -- isis

---

General discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people with the same name)