Uncle Toms Cabin The Icon Black Liv..., Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Toms Cabin The Icon Black Liv..., Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Icon Black Lives Matter Series

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Narrator: Geoffrey Giuliano, The Ark

Unabridged: 18 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/04/2022


Synopsis

Uncle Tom's Cabin is an antislavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".

Stowe, a Connecticutborn woman of English descent, was part of the religious Beecher family and an active abolitionist. She wrote the sentimental novel to depict the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love could overcome slavery. The novel focuses on the character of Uncle Tom, a longsuffering black slave around whom the stories of the other characters revolve.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the bestselling novel and the second bestselling book of the 19th century, following the Bible, and is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. The impact attributed to the book was so great that a likely apocryphal story arose of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe at the start of the Civil War and declaring, "So this is the little lady who started this great war."

The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of negative stereotypes about black people including that of the namesake character "Uncle Tom", with the term now used to describe an excessively subservient person. These associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool". However, the novel stands as a "landmark" in protest literature with later books such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson owing a large debt to it A oneofakind audio encounter for lovers of history, literature, spiritual texts, and inspirational writing.

About Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, to Lyman Beecher, a Calvinist preacher and activist in the antislavery movement, and Roxana Foote, a deeply religious woman who died when Stowe was four years old. Precocious and independent as a child, Stowe enrolled in the seminary run by her eldest sister, Catharine, where she received a traditionally "male" education. At the age of twenty-one, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to join her father, who had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary, and in 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the seminary and an ardent critic of slavery. The Stowes supported the Underground Railroad and housed several fugitive slaves in their home. They eventually moved to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin taught at Bowdoin College.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, prohibiting assistance to fugitives. Stowe was moved to present her objections on paper, and in June 1851, the first installment of Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in the antislavery journal National Era. The forty-year-old mother of seven children sparked a national debate and, as Abraham Lincoln is said to have noted, a war.

Uncle Tom's Cabin met with mixed reviews when it appeared in book form in 1852, but it soon became an international bestseller. Some critics dismissed it as abolitionist propaganda, while others hailed it as a masterpiece. The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy praised Uncle Tom's Cabin as "flowing from love of God and man." Stowe presented her sources to substantiate her claims in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which It Is Based, published in 1853. Another antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, appeared in 1856 but was received with neither the notoriety nor the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Stowe fueled another controversy in The True Story of Lady Byron's Life, in which she accused the poet Lord Byron of having an incestuous love affair with his half sister, Lady Byron. She also took up the topic of domestic culture in works that include The New Housekeeper's Manual, written with her sister Catharine. Stowe died on July 1, 1896, at the age of eighty-five, in Hartford, Connecticut.


Reviews

Goodreads review by James

Review Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is a beautiful story meant for older children or very young adults. It was written in the 19th century by a woman who passed away shortly after its publication. I enjoyed the story and have given it a 3 of 5 stars, which is still very good in my book. A f......more

My first read on anthropomorphism!!Having read novels using literary devices as various personifications but none on anthropomorphism, Black Beauty was a cathartic reading journey for me. Anna Sewell, deep-rooted love for horses and deep-rooted dejection against ill-treatment towards animals, douse......more