“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New Yorker In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife—including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods—revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

No play in the history of the American Stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin . This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduce the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

This volume explores dynamic conversations through history between individuals and communities over questions about religion and state. Divided into two sections, our authors begin with considerations on the separation of religion and state, as well as Roger Williams’ concept of religious freedom. Authors in the first half consider nuanced debates centered on emerging narratives, with particular emphasis on Native America, Early Americans, and experiences in American immigration after Independence. The first half of the volume examines voices in American History as they publicly engage with notions of secular ideology. Discussions then shift as the volume broadens to world perspectives on religion-state relations. Authors consider critical questions of nation, religious identity and transnational narratives. The intent of this volume is to privilege new narratives about religion-state relations. Decentering discussions away from national narratives allows for emerging voices at the individual and community levels. This volume offers readers new openings through which to understand critical but overlooked interactions between individuals and groups of people with the state over questions about religion.

Modeling his latest book on Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 classic The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, the renowned historian Paul Escott has composed ten concise but deeply learned and incisive biographies of key Americans in the years leading up to the Civil War. Escott profiles Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, Albion Tourgée, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, illustrating how these men and women established, embodied, and advanced the opposing political and cultural trends that culminated in the great crisis of the nineteenth century. Covering figures from across a wide political spectrum, Escott reveals numerous streams and facets of nineteenth-century American political thought to illuminate the forces, from slavery to suffrage, underlying this greatest of conflicts. Written accessibly and with a magisterial command of the subject, The Civil War Political Tradition is both a perfect introduction to this history and a penetrating new meditation on its players.

John Beecher (1904-1980) never had the public prominence of his famous ancestors, but as a poet, professor, sociologist, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist, he spent his life fighting for the voiceless and oppressed with a distinct moral sensibility that reflected his self-identification as the twentieth-century torchbearer for his famous family. While John Beecher had many vocations in his lifetime, he always considered himself a poet and a teacher. Some critics have compared the populist elements of Beecher's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but his writing never gained a broad audience or critical acclaim during his lifetime. This book examines Beecher's writing and activism and places them in the broader context of American culture at pivotal points in the twentieth century.

This book challenges the status quo of studies in literature and religion by returning to “experience” as a bridge between theory and practice. Essays focus on keywords of religious experience and demonstrate their applications in drama, fiction, and poetry. Each chapter explores the broad significance of its keyword as a category of psychological and social behavior and tracks its unique articulation by individual authors, including Conrad, Beecher Stowe and Melville. Together, the chapters construct a critical foundation for studying literature not only from the perspectives of theology and historicism but from the ways that literary experience reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges religious experience.

The extensive influence of the creative traditions derived from slave culture, particularly black folklore, in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black authors, such as Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, has become a hallmark of African American scholarship. Yet similar inquiries regarding white authors adopting black aesthetic techniques have been largely overlooked. Gretchen Martin examines representative nineteenth-century works to explore the influence of black-authored (or narrated) works on well-known white-authored texts, particularly the impact of black oral culture evident by subversive trickster figures in John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Joel Chandler Harris's short stories, as well as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson. As Martin indicates, such white authors show themselves to be savvy observers of the many trickster traditions and indeed a wide range of texts suggest stylistic and aesthetic influences representative of the artistry, subversive wisdom, and subtle humor in these black figures of ridicule, resistance, and repudiation. The black characters created by these white authors are often dismissed as little more than limited, demeaning stereotypes of the minstrel tradition, yet by teasing out important distinctions between the wisdom and humor signified by trickery rather than minstrelsy, Martin probes an overlooked aspect of the nineteenth-century American literary canon and reveals the extensive influence of black aesthetics on some of the most highly regarded work by white American authors.

... Jay shows that this tradition [of white-authored protest fiction about racism in America] remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for transmitting intellectual and affective [sic] tools useful in fighting injustice.

Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Sympathetic Sentiments develops an innovative interdisciplinary framework to explore the implications of living in a culture of feeling that seems ill at ease with itself, one in which sentiments are frequently denounced for being sentimental and self-indulgent. These tensions are traced back to the inheritance of the eighteenth century, enabling us to identify a distinctive 'spectacle of sympathy', in which sympathy entails public forms of expression whereby being on show is both a condition of the authenticity of such affects and of their capacity to be masked and simulated. This, John Jervis suggests, is at the root of a range of controversies central to modern life, art and culture, including contemporary debates around trauma and compassion fatigue. Connected to these debates is the issue of modern sensationalism, discussed here and elaborated in a companion volume: Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World, which is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.