If you think the legacy of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park (WV) begins and ends with John Brown's famous 1859 raid, think again. Nineteenth-century developments in the production of firearms pioneered at Harpers Ferry powered the American industrial revolution and armed Civil War soldiers with the deadliest weapons the world had ever seen. In 1862, Confederate General "Stonewall" Jackson captured over 12,000 Union soldiers defending the town--one of the single largest capitulations of American military forces in the nation's history. And in August 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois convened the second meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harpers Ferry and helped give birth to the modern Civil Rights movement in the United States.

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