Summary
Catherine Brekus describes the ripple effects of a book that changed the world.
Transcript
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such a phenomenon when it was published that – the famous story is that Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met her that she was the little woman who had started the great war. She was, in fact, very petite, she was only about 5’2”. That book became immensely popular not only in the United States but around the world. And supposedly, Lenin read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and he saw it as a revolutionary text about the power of the oppressed. And he claimed that many of his ideas actually had come from Stowe’s novel.
