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Uncle Tom's Cabin Book Review

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One of the most influential books ever written, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to advance the anti-slavery cause in the antebellum USA and to try to persuade her compatriots by appealing to their God-given sense of morality, thus interconnecting religious beliefs with abolitionist attitudes. In her preface to the 2003 edition of the book, Amanda Claybaugh points out to the fact that the novel is indebted to the many varied Beecher family projects, the background providing her with a firm foundation and faith in context of the social implications of Christianity. The father 's battle for the soul of the nation, the brothers ' Christian ministries, one sister 's advocacy for women and slaves, another 's celebration …show more content…

The abolitionists’ ideals of setting blacks free were mostly unaccepted by average white men whose economic interests depended on the submission of slaves. The romantic racialism, which proclaimed kindness for the humane treatment of slaves and sympathy to the antislavery argument (and seems to have influenced Stowe according to Claybaugh) strongly opposed the notions of the superiority of the white man who degraded African American race. There was also a contradicting conception of America as a democratic nation since the ideals of human equality and freedom were being censored by the practice of slavery. Published in 1852, mainly as a reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act, the novel brought even more controversy to the slavery issues within this contradictory manifestation. (Gomez R. 116)
Basing his analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the sociologist R.W. Connell’s theory of relations among masculinities, Luis Fernando Gómez R. offers in his article Relations among Masculinities: Controversy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin a complete image of the way in which Stowe perceived slavery, her novel clearly showing opposite relations of dominance, subordination, exploitation, and exclusion between black and white …show more content…

However, Veronica Margrave foregrounds the idea that taking into consideration the deep-rooted connection Stowe’s novel makes with the most popular book and source of her time - The Bible, one can recognize it as a carefully constructed call to Christianity. Most readers do not have the familiarity to The Bible nor use Christian imagery in everyday conversation as they did in Stowe’s day, and this leads the modern reader miss even the smallest religious imagery in the novel. (Margrave,

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This book became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. It highlighted the everyday horrors and injustices of slavery. The author Harriet Beecher Stowe took it upon herself to write this call for justice when reading a letter from her sister in Boston. Her sister had wrote of the terrible things she’d seen happen to African Americans during the time of the Fugitive Slave Act. She described “slave catchers prowling the streets, pouncing on African Americans without warning, breaking into their houses, destroying their shops and carrying them off.”

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DBQ Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851-1852. The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a white abolitionist who believed in the anti-slavery movement. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe. From when Harriet Beecher Stowe was in her twenties she became familiar with stories about slaves and runaways passing through the area. She had hoped it would convince the South and the North that slavery was wrong, but sadly more people supported slavery then against.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe strongly disproved the lies the South had through the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Stowe explained throughout her book the true struggles of a slave and how slaves were treated in the South. Stowe's book was directed toward the North to inform them that the South's political

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Even with Eva’s death in the previous chapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the end of this book has been more impacting than any chapters so far. The treatment of slaves, and yet the kind and Christian actions of Tom, have touched me. I am grateful for this book and the truths about my own country that it has revealed to me. At first, we see Tom with his new slaveholder, Legree, who proves himself to be a cruel and unforgiving man towards his slaves. Tom and Emmeline are taken back to his home, where even the slaves are mean to one another.

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This book tells about slavery in America, which is a period that should never be forgotten. It is definitely a black eye in our nation’s history, and once again the easiest way to not let history repeat itself is by never letting the events be forgotten in the first place. By saving this book and retelling it to others, it would be helping people understand our nation’s history better and more fully, as it describes in great detail the brutal mistreatment put upon slaves during the time it was written. Uncle Tom’s Cabin also features heart-wrenching emotional appeal. Similar to what Elie Wiesel did with Night, Stowe is able to draw an almost personal connection between the reader and the characters in the book.

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According, to Arnold Rampersad, a biographer and literary critic Black Folk became” perhaps the most influential work on blacks in America since Uncle Tom’s cabin.” In the essay by Harriet Beecher Stowe highlighting the horrors of slave

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The novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was written in 1852, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a story about slave owners seeing the cruelties of slavery. Before Stowe’s novel, abolitionism was unpopular, even in the North. The book changed everything. The North was shocked by the truth about slavery, and quickly adopted an abolitionist’s view.

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When people talk about slavery they more or less tend to label the good ones who were against slavery into the North and then the monsters as being the Southerners. Stowe showed the readers that this isn’t true, and that you can’t just point and blame that easily. Through Tom’s owners, Mr. Shelby and St. Clare, Stowe showed us the reality of kindness that some Southern slave owners possessed. Both of these slave owners believed it wrong to harm their slaves and to treat them with any type of cruelty. St. Clare tended to share his opinions on slavery, and Stowe used this character to show how many Southerners thought slavery to be an act of iniquity, but were too stubborn to try and change the ways of their society.

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"Uncle Tom 's Cabin" was abolitionist propaganda, but it was also a brilliant novel that intertwined the stories of a host of memorable characters: the long-suffering slave Uncle Tom, the sadistic overseer Simon Legree, the defiant fugitive George Harris, the antic slave girl Topsy, the conscience-stricken slave owner Augustine St. Clare, and a teeming cast of abolitionists, Southerners and African-Americans. By presenting an array of emotive story lines—e.g., the bonding of Uncle Tom with St. Clare 's saintly daughter Eva, Tom 's fatal persecution at a Louisiana plantation, and the dramatic flight of the Harris family to freedom in the North—the author Harriet Beecher Stowe rendered American slavery as a soul-destroying system of grinding injustice and, for the first time in American literature, depicted slaves as complex, heroic and emotionally nuanced individuals. Did you like it? Why or why not?

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1326 Words | 6 Pages

She met her readers on even ground and conveyed both subtly and powerfully the message contained in her magnum opus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her whole life led to the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: her upbringing in a free state turned her toward the abolitionist cause; Lyman, Harriet’s father, encouraged Harriet to shape her world; her education honed her talents as a writer; and her life and experiences as a married woman in Cincinnati, so close to a slave state, gave her the direction to make Harriet the celebrity activist, the “ . . . little woman who started [the] great

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Written in direct response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Stowe depicted slavery as a crime against home, family and Christian values, with slavery destroying familial relationships and morality among slaves. Additionally, it is depicted as the major threat to the homes of all American people, whether they dwell in the South or the North. Yet, in the modern era, Stowe’s antislavery argument has been viewed as an attack on “masculine” values, of individualism, competition and the economic marketplace, as well as more “feministic” values of community, love and domesticity. Additionally, rather than Tom being the model of Christian values, with his steadfast faith in God, the modern audience generally views Tom as a symbolic model of African-American

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1455 Words | 6 Pages

This also gives the audience an understanding of his past with the relationship of father between the time he was alive and past. The novel then continues to start off with part one. In part one, James Baldwin touches on his first essay with title “Everybody’s Protest Novel”. Baldwin examines Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s as he describes it as “cornerstone of American social protest fiction”. Baldwin describes this novel (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) as it describes the life of the slaves and the daily life on a plantation.

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Some people were very supportive of the book whereas others did not bother to read it. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is one of the most influential novels in American history and especially around the Civil War time period. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the abolitionist novel in hopes of creating national discussion. Stowe prompted a debate about change that was centered on the social movement of abolitionism. Her book raised awareness among abolitionists and northerners who had never interacted with African Americans or had never experienced slavery first hand.

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Colonists began to build a settlement in North America after gaining their independence from Great Britain. Slavery in North America began when African slaves were brought to Jamestown in order to aid in the production of crops that would later fuel the economic establishment of North America. The African Slave trade gained prominence in the seventeenth century when African American slaves began to replace the bulk of indentured servants. Eventually slaves and their decedents made up majority of the population in some states. In fact, “New World plantation agriculture came to depend on the labor of enslaved workers…”

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1588 Words | 7 Pages

During the 1800s, America became split up into two groups: either proslavery or abolitionists. Before the Civil War, predominantly the North and South were against each other on whether or not there should be slavery. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published the controversial novel, Uncle Tom 's Cabin. It is said to that, "Uncle Tom 's Cabin is perhaps the most influential and iconic novel ever written by an American" (Reynolds). The book was a powerful source that gave the abolitionist movements the momentum they needed to gain more support from the Northerners.

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