Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Her novel helped to end slavery and proved that Lincoln was right when he said, “Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”
Brought to the stage without her consent, this enduring American drama did not bring the author a cent—but it gave actors a living for generations
To early Americans the Old Testament and its scenes, even its speech and names, were as familiar as their own backyard
He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.
The two most popular novels in 19th-century America were Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896).
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly.
Walden is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook.
America is not a nation of readers, yet books have had a deep and lasting effect on its national life.
To stave off despair, the President relied on a sense of humor that was rich, self-deprecating—and surprisingly bawdy
A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham Lincoln once counseled his friend Joshua Speed, “will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” No aspect of Lincoln’s character has become more tangibly real in the literature than his melanch
How the mistress of the plantation became a slave
“WE’RE USED to living around ‘em. You Northerners aren’t. You don’t know anything about ‘em.” This is or was the all-purpose utterance of white Southerners about blacks.
Nearly two centuries after Crèvecoeur propounded his notorious question—“What then is the American, this new man?”—Vine Deloria, Jr., an American Indian writing in the Bicentennial year on the subject “The North Americans” for Crisis
Beset with ailments, Victorian women found solace, in more ways than one, in a new panacea—hydropathy
A century and a half ago American women faced a very different life prospect than today. Without dependable birth-control techniques they could expect to spend their prime years bearing children.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at
Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in t
True classics never die. But sometimes second-rate works also acquire unique longevity. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin , born in 1852.
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