Uncle Tom’s Cabin book club
Supposedly, shortly after the Civil War starte,d President Lincoln met with Harriet Beecher Stowe and joked, “So, you’re the little lady who started this war.” Now, historians say that probably didn’t happen, but that book did inspire large portions of the abolitionist movement and sold like crazy during the mid-nineteenth century. This was an interesting book and a movie as we didn’t end up watching the movie because at the time I thought the movie was on Prime only to discover the night we went to watch it, the movie was not on Prime. I highly recommend reading this book as part of your history lessons as part of your Civil War Unit for high school.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin follows several different enslaved people as they choose how they will handle their enslavement.
This is really tricky to summarize because there are a couple of different plot points in here.
The titular character, Uncle Tom, is sold from family to family. Almost freed, betrayed, and finally sold to a brutal owner who eventually beat him to death. Through it all, Uncle Tom chooses to trust God and chooses not to fight back and will counsel other slaves to endure as God told them to, but he does not stop; they choose to run away.
I admired him because he chose to walk a very hard line with what he did, but it’s also one that will not have many people admiring him.
Now, other storylines is a woman who chooses to run away rather than let her daughter be sold away from her. A mother and daughter who are about to be sold, and the daughter chooses to enhance her beauty (playing up her curls, that sort of thing), thinking it will help her get a better placement, and how it does not end well. What happened to the original family that owned Uncle Tom.
I don’t know quite how to explain this, and it’s been a few years since we read the book.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin book club
Our Uncle Tom’s Cabin book club was a rather informal time where we primarily talked about the characters and how we saw the story interacting with history.
That being said, I foolishly don’t remember the specific things we talked about because it was over three years ago. Instead, I’m going to link to some other discussion questions I found that had similar discussion questions I found interesting.
What I find fascinating is how often people talk about the character of Uncle Tom and how we talk about an “Uncle Tom” as someone who is bad, but the book itself portrays Uncle Tom as a good person and someone to be admired. Over and over again on many of the sites I see, people keep coming back to the concept of constantly hearing the idea of being an Uncle Tom is a bad person and a race traitor, but then they read the book and they admired Uncle Tom in the book because he is genuinely a nice person.
It’s a fascinating topic to cover.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin book club snacks
There is always this weird feeling when creating snacks for a very heavy book, but we have a tradition of very silly snacks, so it can feel weird at times to write about the snacks we made for books like this.
Our solution for the more serious books, because those are usually historical in nature is to pull inspiration from the time period and any food mentioned in the book.
There was not much food mentioned in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but a few items were mentioned and a couple of items were taken inspiration from.
- taters- I just cooked up a whole mess of baked potatoes and let people put whatever they wanted on top of it.
- Ham- there is mention of a meal where ham is served, and so we cooked a ham I had saved in the freezer.
- Corn cake- I’m pretty sure we grabbed a cornbread mix and cooked it up as muffins.
- pound cake- I forget if The Artist found a recipe she wanted to try or if we made a box cake, but either way it was delicious. This was another one of those items mentioned in the book.
- Pies- we made this as little hand pies, and I think I used jams as the filling or maybe pumpkin pie as the filling.
- Then some of the less kind enslavers drank to excess so we had some root beer and cream soda to represent the various alcohol people drank.
All in all, this was an excellent book to read as we had so many great discussions from it. I highly recommend reading it.
