Uncle Tom's Cabin and Popular Culture: Web Sites

"Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site commemorates the life of Reverend Josiah Henson. Recognized for his contributions to the abolition movement and for his work in the Underground Railroad, he rose to international fame after Harriet Beecher Stowe acknowledged his memoirs as a source for her 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was Henson's life experiences that inspired Ms. Stowe's creation of the character Uncle Tom in her 1852 outcry against slavery."

Website containing digitized PDF versions of all 103 issues of Freedom's Journal, "the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States." Scroll down to the bottom of the page, where the issues are linked into two volumes.

"Text, photos, and recordings of some selected Work Progress Administration interviews are presented online. Developed for classroom use at the University of Virginia."

Produced by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia, and teachinghistory.org, "This well-designed, comprehensive website explores Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as an American cultural phenomenon." One section focuses " on responses from 1852 to 1930. "'Other Media' explores theatrical and film versions, children's books, songs, poetry, and games."

This site offers information on merchandise tie-ins to UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

From the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and the University of Virginia, "(u)sually the best place to enter is the BROWSE MODE, which gives you the most direct access to the story of Stowe's story as an American cultural phenomenon. If you're new to the site, the best place to start is probably the Timeline in the INTERPET MODE, which provides a quick overview of both that story and the various kinds of resources the archive contains."

"Anti-Slavery collection (approximately 40,000 pieces). In the late 1890's, the family of William Lloyd Garrison, along with others closely involved in the anti-slavery movement, presented the library with a major gathering of correspondence, documents, and other original material relating to the abolitionist cause from 1832 until after the Civil War."

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs."

"The New York Public Library Schomburg Collection is 'the world's leading publicly-accessible research institution for the study of the history and culture of peoples of African descent.' Notes on its collection appear on its home page and most of its materials appear in the online exhibits are also being organized." This link takes you directly to a listing of items in the collection related to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"Along with the link to African American Odyssey, which displays more than 240 items from the impressive African American collections at the Library of Congress, this page links to some of the digital collections of the Library, including The Fredrick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress and Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 among others."

"Contains the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, which "presents a panoramic and eclectic review of African-American history and culture, spanning almost one hundred years from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900." Allows for keyword searching and browsing by subject or author index."

"Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. Includes search by keywords, browse narratives by narrator, browse photographs by subject, browse all by state sections."

"Containing almost seven hours of material recorded between 1932 and 1975, this site features twenty-three recorded interviews with individuals born between 1823 and the early 1860's discussing many of the issues encompassing slavery."

"The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, de

This page on the "American Memory" section of the Library of Congress web site, provides background information on the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and includes images from LC's collection of theatrical posters, two of which are shown at right.

"The "Commemorating Abolition" project aims to raise public awareness of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain,to be celebrated in 2007" This page on the project's site discusses the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN --"Uncle Tom’s Cabin through the decades: A story told in illustrations" -- and discusses the evolution of the book's illustrations. Many images are included.