Uncle Tom's Cabin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Great War ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Chattel Slavery

`So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!' These words, said to have been uttered by Abraham Lincoln, signal the celebrity of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first American novel to become an international best-seller, Stowe's novel charts the progress from slavery to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of American chattel slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. At the middle of the nineteenth-century, the names of its characters - Little Eva, Topsy, Uncle Tom - were renowned. A hundred years later, `Uncle Tom' still had meaning, but, to Blacks everywhere it had become a curse. This edition firmly locates Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncles Tom's Cabin.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-322
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Full Diversity ◽  
Large Numbers

The epilogue notes that kinship, privilege, occupation, intragroup status, and social mobility affected crucial transitions in self-awareness as well as class awareness among the narrators. Growing self-respect kindled in many narrators a desire for a future that coalesced around an imagined free self. Narrating this process of inner growth individualized and liberated African American personhood in mid-century literature. Slave narratives from this generation created the most sophisticated commentary on caste and class in the South to be found in nineteenth-century American literature. In the late nineteenth century, former slaves continued to publish autobiographies in large numbers. Their experiences in slavery and perspectives on it were often very different from those of the antebellum narrators. Without taking into account the slave narratives published between 1865 and 1901, our comprehension of slavery and the full diversity of African American self-portraiture in the slave narrative will remain limited and partial.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
New England ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Theatrical Performance

It is nearly impossible to talk about US sentimentalism without talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Introduction thus discusses US reactions to an 1887 Mexican theatrical performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to illustrate how Transamerican Sentimentalism dislocates familiar scholarly narratives about US literary sentimentalism as a New England or abolitionist mode. The Introduction links transamerican and sentimental scholarship through questions of incommensurability before elaborating on how US sentimentalism connects to a broader Americas tradition. It then delineates the parameters of a transamerican sentimentalism by articulating the implications of reorienting such an important national and transatlantic mode. Finally, the Introduction offers an overview of how persistent recurrences of transamerican sentimentalism enabled African American, Native American, and Latinx writers to navigate the violent, multivalent realm of the nineteenth-century Americas.

scholarly journals Black Cowboys In the American West: A Historiographical Review

1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
David Goldstein-Shirley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American West ◽  
The United States ◽  
Half Century ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Few subjects in the ethnic experience of the United States are as fraught with mythology and misinformation as black cowboys. Although absent from most classic history texts of the American West, black cowboys probably constituted about a quarter of the working cowboys in the nineteenth century, although q uantitative data to establish a number are lacking. This essay reviews the historiography of black cowboys published during the last half-century, noting how much of it is marred either by glossing over the presence of black cowboys or by credulously repeating estimates of their numbers established by earlier work. The essay speculates whether such problematic scholarship stems from unacknowledged prejudice among mainstream historians or from carelessness and calls for more and improved scholarly attention to the role of African American cowboys in the American West.

Money and Art in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-266
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Baird
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Year 2000

Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, was the second most popular American novel of the nineteenth century after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy imagines Boston in the year 2000. Equality prevails, while money and law have disappeared. This essay focuses on Bellamy’s account of how literature thrives in this society and shows that it is fundamentally flawed. First, to explain how literature is produced, Bellamy is forced to introduce a form of money into his society after all. Moreover, he has no way to explain why the logic that leads to the introduction of money in order to make literature possible does not apply to producing everything else a well-lived life requires. Second, the literature that Bellamy envisions suggests that his world is no utopia at all. It is instead a dull dystopian place in which neither literature nor art is likely to flourish.

scholarly journals Charting New Venues for Teaching Literary Texts through Black English Vernacular in EFL Context: Case of H.B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yamina ILES ◽  
Amine BELMEKKI
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Method ◽  
Black English ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Efl Context ◽  
The Past ◽  
Selection Of

This research paper attempts at studying the operation of literary texts teaching through Black English Vernacular (BEV) in EFL context, selecting the American novel: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, henceforth (UTC), (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) as a parameter of research. Its main aim is to reveal and project the new venues for teaching literary texts through BEV in EFL classroom. The choice of this novel constitutes a luxuriant source of investigation. Additionally, it is abundant with various cultural elements used by its characters. The significance of the study relies on the examination and analysis of lexical items regarding the role of literature in the EFL context between the past and the present time. Also, with the difficulties of using literary texts as language tools in the EFL educational milieu. After implementing a stylistic analytical method on the selected novel, the results of the study end up by the selection of certain lexical entries from Black English that can be used as a reference in the teaching of literature in EFL contexts.

scholarly journals Savagely Sentimental: The Creation and Destruction of the Sentimental Indian in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Lydia Maria Child, known during her time for controversial writing, has largely fallen out of focus in current feminist studies. As an activist, many of her pieces questioned the role of gender, race, and sexuality in the early nineteenth century. Hobomok, published in 1824, is considered one of her most radical tales. Detailing the marriage and procreation of a white woman and a Native American man, Hobomok shocked audiences with its content. Many critics have come to view Hobomok as a piece of feminine rebellion, seeing Mary Conant as an example of feminine refusal. Although such interpretations hold merit, they often ignore the role of Hobomok, the titular character. Hobomok is the first visible experimentation of the sentimental male. Other adaptations of the sentimental male do not appear in literature until Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I argue that Child attempts to create one of the first sentimental males through Hobomok by compounding the qualities of masculinity and femininity of the era. Child is able to attempt such a task due to the pre-established concept of the “Noble Savage,” which already imbued Indians with sentimental attributes, and provides a valid and even rational justification for his extinction. Once establishing Hobomok as a “Noble Savage” and compounding masculine and feminine qualities within him, Child can easily and completely dismiss him so as to minimize his threat to white nineteenth century society. It is the compilation of his “noble savagery” and his feminine qualities that engenders his extermination. 

Singing Abolition

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-146
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
The Uk

This Chapter deals with a hitherto neglected aspect of anti-slavery opinion building, namely the role of anti-slavery songs. Hundreds of these songs – really abolitionist poems set to popular melodies -- were produced during the nineteenth century, on topics as diverse as the slave experience and contemporary public events. In essence, these were protest songs, designed to inform and inspire. The Chapter also looks at the emergence of anti-slavery performers, chief among them the Hutchinson Family Singers from New Hampshire, who electrified audiences during the 1840s with their performances. In 1846, the Hutchinsons visited Britain where they met with a different reception, their peculiar brand of musical advocacy alienating some section of the British public. The chapter analyses the reasons for this ‘failure’, while concluding with a discussion of spirituals (slave songs) as performed by African American visitors to the UK, among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Chinn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
The People ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Formative Experiences

Abstract This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena. According to many of the people who lived through it, enslaved childhood was a shifting, episodic phenomenon that had multiple points of definition. Throughout the nineteenth century, as their adult selves looked back on their early years, formerly enslaved people adopted a number of different strategies to understand and narrate how they came to be who they were and what their formative experiences meant in terms of the trajectory of their lives. They wrote within a literary culture that was itself partially responsible for creating (and certainly was instrumental in promoting and perpetuating) the temporal understanding of childhood as unidirectional, progressive, and only tangentially connected to material reality. But they also described quite different temporal patterns for slave childhood. These patterns are the focus of my analysis here: how African American narrators negotiated their vexed relationship to childhood as both never- and always-children in order to challenge the growing consensus on how childhood could and should be staged in literary texts. My primary sources are narratives by formerly enslaved people, written, as most slave narratives were, primarily but not exclusively for white readers.

Escaped Nuns

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Maria Monk

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery sold over 20,000 copies. By “escaped nun,” Maria Monk, the book provided a shocking exposé of convent life, from licentious priests to tortured nuns to infanticide. Despite Maria Monk’s unveiling as an imposter, her book went on to become the second bestseller before the Civil War, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Far from representing a curious aberration, Monk’s book was part of a larger phenomenon, involving riots, propaganda, and politics. The campaign against convents was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and in particular the role of women in the republic. At a time when concern for “female virtue” consumed many Americans, nuns were a barometer of attitudes toward women. The veiled nun stood as the inversion of the true woman, needed to sustain the purity of the nation. She was a captive for a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a “white slave,” and a “foolish virgin.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers, both male and female, crafted this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns and women more broadly in America.

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