Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin is an 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe depicting the cruelties of American slavery.
The book became enormously influential in shaping Northern antislavery sentiment before the Civil War.
Lincoln allegedly greeted Stowe as "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." The title character, a long-suffering enslaved man, gave rise to the pejorative term Uncle Tom for a Black person seen as excessively deferential to whites.
- Fugitive Slave ActLaw mandating escapee return
- abolitionismMovement to end oppression
- antislavery movementCampaign against human bondage
- TopsyTurvy's chaotic companion
- moral suasionPersuasion through values
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Dred Scott decision · sectionalism · minstrel shows · stage adaptations · slave narratives · chattel slavery · sold down the river · antebellum America · Underground Railroad · Civil War · racial stereotypes · adaptations · social reform movements · emancipation · melodrama · serialized fiction · banned books
- American LiteratureThe Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Moby Dick
- Reform Writingmuckraking, exposés, investigative reports, slave narratives, manifestos
- classicsHomer, Iliad, the Iliad, Odyssey, the Odyssey
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, antislavery, abolitionism
- 1840s-1850sOregon Trail, California Gold Rush, Mexican-American War, Manifest Destiny, Underground Railroad
- American BooksTo Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Catch-22, Walden