Uncle Tom's Cabin: Historiography

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a book that was published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book was a spark to the world. It sold more than 300,000 copies within a year of publication and was later issued more than three times to become one of the most remarkable best sellers in American history. This text brought a message of abolitionism to a gigantic new group of people. Not only did the people who read the book knew about it, but even the people that had seen dramatizations of the story by theaters throughout the nation. It made a huge emotional impact to the world by the book’s portrayal of slavery as a threat to the family and out of the ordinary of domesticity. The textbook, America: Past & Present, was written by Divine, Breen, Fredrickson, and Williams. They use a social filter to describe what happened to the nation when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. In telling this event, the author states, “Northern textbooks were banished from southern schools in favor of those with a prosouthern slant; young men were induced to stay in the South for higher education rather than going North, and a movement developed to encourage southern industry and commerce as a way of reducing dependence on the North.” In other words, the South is feeling some type of way towards the North; trying to shut them down or cut them off in any possible way. They feel a sort of emotion such as hatred or even fear. In addition, the text book American History: A Survey used a political point of view. The authors, Richard N. Current, T. Harry Williams, Frank Freidel, and Alan Brinkley use standard point of view to introduce the idea. Harriet Stowe’s book became a part of American popular legend. The authors stated, “And in both regions, her novel helped to inflame sectional tensions to a new level of passion”. “… the institution of slavery was dividing America”. This is presented through a social standing point because the authors stated that this is affecting the nation all over.