When first published, Uncle Tomis Cabin brought with its huge success enormous attention to the depravity of slavery. Many people, however, questioned the basis of truth of the novel. In response, Ms. Stowe gathered her research materials and published them in this now rare book.
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Review Summary: Amazing Documentation of an Amazing Story
Review: Upon publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, HB Stowe was attacked immediately by pro-slavery writers. Her work was dismissed as fiction, an abolitionist's distorted view, and totally representing slavery in the South. Mrs. Stowe responded by collecting and expanding her factual documentation. She started to write a 25-page pamphlet, to be added as an appendix to the next edition of Cabin. But the work consumed her, as she confronted the stories of many escaped slaves, newspaper articles, court testimony, and even the text of state laws. The defense project grew to over 500 pages, and is a major work in its own right.
Frederick Douglas called it a major contribution to the war against slaveholders: "...for the 'Key' not only proves the correctness of every essential part of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but proves more and worse things against themurderous system than are alleged in that great book."
Historians and history teachers must have this book, as a reference and as an experience. Anyone who strives to understand the burning issues that ignited the War between the States needs this book. I recommend it.
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Review Summary: A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin ebook
Review: If you're teaching or studying black history, the Inkling ebook edition of A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (ISBN: B000BGQ9E4) is a great bargain. You get an exact facsimile of the classic 1853 edition with the original small type enlarged to fit 8.5x11 inch pages for easier reading and printing.
Best of all, despite Amazon's boilerplate remarks about "most publishers do not allow e-books to be printed" none of the restrictive digital rights management is turned on. You can print and copy all the pages you like.
A lot of people make fun of Uncle Tom's Cabin, make fun of it's mid-nineenth century literary style and neglecting the enormous impact it has had. Here's what George Orwell, the author of two literary classics, Animal Farm and 1984, said about Uncle Tom's Cabin:
"A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad book": that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished....
Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But Uncle Tom's Cabin, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real world.... And by the same token I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies."
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Review Summary: Review
Review: My reason for reading this book was to understand why some Blacks today are called 'Uncle Toms'. Once I began the book, I realized that I would have to stop looking at the book frrom the perspective of a Black woman in the year 2001. That the author was not a slave or a Black is very obvious, and her own misconceptions about Blacks are very disturbing. But she is, after all, writing from her the only point of view she knew. I found the book to be very engrossing, easy to read and also interesting enough to keep me from flipping to the end.
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Review Summary: "it was a good book and I could read it over and over again.
Review: "Uncle Tom's Cabin was a very good book. I wouldn't encourage younger people like 4th and 5th graders to read it, but I think everyone needs to read it by the time they graduate from school."