David S. Reynolds -- Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America

Join the Spirit of '76 Bookstore and the Salem Athenaeum for a lecture, Q&A, and book signing with David S. Reynolds!

Some consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be the most influential American novel ever written. In a fitting tribute to the 200th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian David S. Reynolds reveals her book’s impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War, but also on worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia. He explores how both Stowe’s background as the daughter in a famously intellectual family of preachers and her religious visions were fundamental to the novel. Reynolds also demonstrates why the book was beloved by millions and even won over some southerners while fueling lasting conflicts over the meaning of America. Although as vilified over the years as it is praised, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has remained a cultural landmark, proliferating in the form of plays, songs, and films in a rich legacy that has both fed and contested American racial stereotypes.

David S. Reynolds is an historian and literary critic, noted for his specialized books on the Civil War period and his expert knowledge of Walt Whitman. He is the author of Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson; Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights; Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, and Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. He is also the author or editor of nine other books and has written many articles, book chapters, and book reviews.