Rethinking Uncle Tom—The Political Philosophy of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Rethinking Uncle Tom thoroughly explains Uncle Tom's Cabin as an articulation of the conditions of democratic life and the nature of modern humanism. The most mature elements of Stowe's political thought emerge from a close reading of Sunny Memories and of Oldtown Folks. This book develops familiarity with the moral discourse of abolition and nineteenth-century reformism, and it offers a glimpse of an America envisioned as producing a nobility of soul represented in the human model of surpassing excellence.

W. B. Allen is emeritus professor of political science at Michigan State University and author of George Washington: America's First Progressive andThe Personal and the Political: Three Fables by Montesquieu. An Introduction to Political Philosophy.