Harriet Beecher Stowe, Amanda Claybaugh, Jonathan (AFT) Arac - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Selling more than 300,000 copies the first year it was published, Stowe s powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Supposedly, when Stowe met President Lincoln ten years later, he joked, So this is the little lady who made this big war. The plot centers on Eliza Harris and Tom Shelby, two people who triumph over slavery in very different ways. Today, critics, scholars, and students alike are revisiting this monumental work with fresh eyes and open minds, focusing on Stowe s portrayal of women and the novel s theological underpinnings.

In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of HumanityLate in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P-------, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two "gentlemen." One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much over-dressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gayly with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold ...