The Uncle Tom Episode

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was an outsized media event. No one in America in the 1850s could avoid knowing something of its characters and themes. It brought into the homes and hearts of millions of Americans a dramatic and heartrending story about an enslaved family. White people who wanted to avoid thinking about the reality of human enslavement found it harder to avoid. Uncle Tom reached places that nothing else had—but did it really play a role in bringing about the Civil War? To find out, Adam talks to John Brooke, a historian at Ohio State University who thinks it did. The reader in this episode is Olivia Marshall.

Download this episode here.