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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
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This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he must endure brutal treatment. This is a powerful tale of the extreme cruelties of slavery, as well as the price of loyalty and morality. When first published, it helped to solidify the anti-slavery sentiments of the North, and it remains today as the book that helped move a nation to civil war. "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers.…
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"Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”"
"Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, made a huge impression on me, so that I am passionate about racial discrimination."
"A close second is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which my literary colleagues tend to dismiss but that generates arguments among students about slavery that are invariably surprising in their sophistication."
"Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She demonstrates that one can write something that changes the world and makes it a better place. She reinforces the concept that the root of evil is the abuse of power, and it is important for all of us to remember that."
"Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery activist novel, written in the run-up to the Civil War . Stowe tried to mediate the widening schism between North and South, but the book had the opposite effect – prodding North and South to greater extremes of rage. With some justice, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been called a cause of the Civil War. When President Abraham Lincoln met the author at the White House, he greeted her as “the little lady that started the big war.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the prime candidate bandied around at the time that the concept of the Great American Novel was first in wide circulation. So, there’s a historical reason to include it as a GAN. But there are intrinsic reasons as well. The novel has two plot strands that cut in opposite directions. The main plot involves the selling of the nominal hero, Uncle Tom, from a plantation in the upper south into harsher forms of slavery. The other sub-plot involves the opposite movement of a Frederick Douglass -like slave who escapes North with his wife, who is from the same plantation as Uncle Tom. Stowe presses harder and wider on the anti-slavery theme than just to say that it’s bad to subject Blacks to chattel status. To hit the middle-class reader square in the gut, she shows how slavery destroys families. It was wildly successful. It always has been a marketing ploy, used to telegraph a big achievement. In this case, the advertisement avoids branding it as fiction because when Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared novels, as a genre, still lay under a cloud of suspicion. But you can find slogans like ‘one of the greatest American novels of our time’ from the late nineteenth century forward."