During our recent volunteers Zoom meeting participants were asked to answer 7 multiple choice trivia questions. Only one of these failed to get one correct response from the over 20 folks participating: “Which painter wrote of Harriet that she “helps us to understand how applicable the Gospel is in this day and age,” and later included Uncle Tom's Cabin in a still life? a. Winslow Homer b. Thomas Kinkade c. Georgia O’Keefe d. Vincent Van Gogh” No one chose the correct answer – “d”. I learned of Van Gogh’s admiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe this past July from an article written for a daily email newsletter which I receive, the “Literary Hub.” Entitled “The Writers Vincent van Gogh Loved, From Charles Dickens to Harriet Beecher Stowe: 6 Books Essential to Our Understanding of the Artist,” it was written by Mariella Guzzoni, an independent scholar and art curator living in Bergamo, Italy. Over many years, she has collected editions of the books that Vincent van Gogh read and loved. In March the University of Chicago Press published her study “Vincent's Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him.” Ms. Guzzoni writes of Van Gogh: “Vincent was an avid and multilingual reader, a man who could not do without books. In his brief life he devoured hundreds of them in four languages, spanning centuries of art and literature. Throughout his life, his reading habits reflected his various personae—art dealer, preacher, painter—and were informed by his desire to learn, discuss, and find his own way to be of service to humanity.” In June 1880 Van Gogh wrote in a letter that he had been reading Beecher Stowe. Ms. Guzzoni writes: “Vincent, 27, is in the mining region of the Borinage, in Belgium. For a year and a half he has been among the miners, seeking to console the workers of the underworld. He is at a dead end. He cuts himself off from the world, and immerses himself in reading. Two books were crucial in what was to become the period of his rebirth as an artist: Histoire de la révolution française (History of the French Revolution, in 9 volumes), by the greatest of the French romantic historians, Jules Michelet, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that helped foment anti-slavery sentiment in the United States and abroad. Michelet’s new approach to writing history dared to give the People agency, placing them firmly at the center of the revolutionary dynamic. Vincent, too, would put the faces of the People at the center of his revolution in portraiture. Michelet himself described Beecher Stowe as “the woman who wrote the greatest success of the time, translated into every language and read around the world, having become the Gospel of liberty for a race.” What are the common themes? The fight for freedom and independence; the moral importance of literature; the plight of the poor and deprived. Both books were modern gospels for Vincent in a moment of great doubt, when he rejected the “established religious system.” “Take Michelet and Beecher Stowe, they don’t say, the gospel is no longer valid, but they help us to understand how applicable is it in this day and age, in this life of ours, for you, for instance, and for me…” In Van Gogh’s painting “L'Arlésienne (portrait of Madame Ginoux),” of which there are more than one version, there are two books on the table. One is Dickens' Christmas Tales and the other Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. About the author:
Frederick Warren is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, as well as a tour guide for the Friends of Music Hall. He is a retired estimator for a book printing and binding firm in Cincinnati.
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The Louisiana Purchase was by far the largest territorial gain in United States history, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. After Louisiana became a state the Purchase was renamed the Missouri Territory by Congress in June 1812. This sparked a debate in Washington as to whether the Missouri Territory would be free or slave. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward described it as, “The whole nation lies spread out like a gambler’s table”.
During the 1840s there was a push to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories as part of a plan to build a transcontinental railroad. The question of whether the rail line should pass through northern free territory or southern slave territory was hotly debated. It became clear that no progress on the railroad could be made unless the limits on slavery articulated in the Missouri Compromise could be removed. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas proposed a bill that offered residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories a choice as to whether they would permit or reject slavery on their soil. The fine details of the bill led Northerners and Southerners to find self interested reasons to deny its passage. Moved by the immorality of slavery and angered by the Compromise of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When it was published as a two-volume work in 1852 it proved to be extremely popular in England. In May, 1853, during a visit to England, Stowe was presented with a petition signed by over a half million British women. This petition was titled, "An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America.” The women of Britain hoped the petition would rouse women in the United States to the anti-slavery cause. In response, Stowe promised to establish a committee of women in America to generate support for abolition. The effort proved unsuccessful as Stowe had no strong connections to either established women's organizations or anti-slavery groups. However in March, 1854, Stowe published “An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America on the Present Crisis in Our Country.” She urged women to petition, organize, and pray to prevent slavery in the nascent states of the Missouri Territory. (see reference below for this publication) After much debate, The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress on May 30, 1854, and signed by President Franklin Pierce. It divided the region along the 40th parallel, with Kansas to the South and Nebraska to the North. It did allow people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´. President Pierce and Senator Douglas hoped that, “Popular Sovereignty” would help bring an end to the national debate over slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act outraged many Northerners, giving rise to the anti-slavery Republican Party. After passage of the act, pro- and anti-slavery elements flooded into Kansas with the goal of establishing a population that would vote for or against slavery. The result was a series of armed conflicts known as "Bleeding Kansas". Sources: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life by Joan Hedrick published 1994 by Oxford University press https://www.accessible-archives.com/2012/03/an-appeal-to-the-women-of-the-free-states-of-america/ https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/kansas.html About the author: Dr. Nicholas Andreadis is a volunteer at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. He was a professor and dean at Western Michigan University prior to moving to Cincinnati. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 6, 2020 Media Contact: Christina Hartlieb 513-751-0651 chartlieb@stowehousecincy.org 20th century porch and paint coming off to restore 1840s appearance (CINCINNATI, OH)– Site restoration is active at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Walnut Hills, a site of the Ohio History Connection. In the past few weeks, historic restoration experts have removed decorative wooden brackets that were added to “Victorianize” the house in the late 1800s and they have detached the large front porch that was added in the 20th century. Many of these elements are being saved and stored for future museum exhibits. Up to 17 layers of paint are currently being removed through chemical and manual processes, with special attention being paid to safe disposal of all potentially hazardous elements. The paint removal will make way for masonry repair, tuckpointing, and repainting in historically-accurate colors determined through historic paint analysis last summer. This research determined the color of the home at the time the Beechers occupied it in the 1840s was a shade of yellow with dark green shutters. The house remains OPEN to tours by appointment during this restoration project and is also continuing its regular programming schedule online. Built in 1832, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House was originally the president’s home on the campus of Lane Theological Seminary. It is the final property remaining from the campus in Walnut Hills. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who moved to Cincinnati with her father at the age of 21, lived in Cincinnati for 18 years and went on to write the influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. This historic site is located at 2950 Gilbert Avenue in Cincinnati. The Beecher family lived in the home from 1832-1851, including Harriet’s older sister Catherine Beecher, a national leader in teacher training for women and younger sister Isabella Beecher who would go on to be influential in the women’s suffrage movement in Connecticut. The house was subsequently occupied by three generations of the Monfort family who made significant additions and renovations to the home. In the 20th century the site served as a long-term boarding house and had a tavern that was listed in the Green Book. The house was purchased in 1943 by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Home Memorial Association and opened to the public as a historic site in 1949. The site’s last major renovation project took place in the 1970s under the leadership of George Wilson and the Citizen’s Committee on Youth. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House is an Ohio History Connection historic site and is managed locally by the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House. For more information on the site, visit www.stowehousecincy.org or call 513-751-0651. ### ABOUT HARRIET BEECHER STOWE HOUSE The nonprofit Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House manages a Cincinnati home where Harriet Beecher Stowe lived during the formative years that led her to write the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This historic site is part of the Ohio History Connection’s network of more than 50 sites and museums across Ohio. For more information about programs and events, call 513-751-0651 or visit www.stowehousecincy.org. Ohio History Connection The Ohio History Connection, formerly the Ohio Historical Society, is a statewide history organization with the mission to spark discovery of Ohio’s stories. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization chartered in 1885, the Ohio History Connection carries out history services for Ohio and its citizens focused on preserving and sharing the state’s history. This includes housing the state historic preservation office, the official state archives, local history office and managing more than 50 sites and museums across Ohio. For more information on programs and events, visit ohiohistory.org. A Son of the Forest and “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” In 1829, Harriet Beecher, though still in her teens, was a teacher at her sister Catherine’s Hartford Female Seminary. She was also an enthusiastic participant in the school’s campaign of writing letters, petitions, and circulars on behalf of the Cherokee Indians. In President Andrew Jackson’s State of the Union address in 1829, he supported calls for the Cherokees’ forced relocation from their ancestral homeland in Georgia to federal territory west of the Mississippi. Harriet decried that policy. That same year, William Apess’s A Son of the Forest became the first extensive autobiography written and published by a Native American. With Native American, white, and possibly African American ancestry, Apess identified with the remnant of the Pequot people, a group his father had joined. Most Pequots had been massacred or dispersed by whites in the Pequot War of the 1630s. Son of the Forest traces Apess’s struggle with alcoholism, military service for the U.S. in the War of 1812, and conversion to evangelical Methodism. He became an ordained minister in the newly forming Protestant Methodist Church. In Apess’s autobiography and other works such as “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833), Christianity serves as a standard by which to judge—and condemn—white treatment of Native Americans. (Apess preferred the term “Natives” to the more common “Indians,” which he considered “a slur upon an oppressed and scattered nation.”) One of Apess’s important strategies was to link the oppression of Native Americans with that of African Americans and other people of color around the world: “If black or red skin or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth.” In addition to his writing, Apess became an activist for the rights of the Mashpee people in Massachusetts. He was jailed for civil disobedience, and the Mashpees’ nonviolent protest won some of their demands. Apess died in 1839 at the age of 41. We don’t know if Harriet read his work, but scholars think that Apess may have influenced Thoreau, Melville, and especially Frederick Douglass as he was writing “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. You can read Son of the Forest and “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” on line for free. Just search by title. Let us know what connections you see between Apess’s work and Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. Or what about connections to writing from our own time? About the author:
Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Xavier University, retired in 2017 after teaching English there for 45 years. He specializes in American literature, especially nineteenth century, as well as the intersections of literature and peace studies. He has written articles on a variety of authors including Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, and Ursula Le Guin. He appears in the documentary film Becoming Harriet Beecher Stowe, scheduled for release soon by Fourth Wall Films. Herman Melville, Moby Dick and "Benito Cereno" Herman Melville was a New Yorker who went to sea, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was a New Englander who spent eighteen important years in Cincinnati. It’s unlikely that Harriet read Melville’s books, and Melville may have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin but only after writing Moby-Dick. Still, these two authors have more in common than you might think. Both were raised in Calvinist households, Melville in the Dutch Reformed Church and Harriet in her father’s Presbyterianism. Both also later switched to churches with more optimistic theologies, Melville to Unitarianism and Harriet to the Episcopal Church. Scholar David Reynolds suggests that the gloomy Calvinist background and the spiritual questioning that followed account for the surprising number of characters who question their faith in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Push Uncle Tom’s Cabin a bit more toward the dark side and we’re in the doubt-riddled world of Melville, Hawthorne, and Dickinson.” The year 1851 was central to the writing lives of both Harriet and Melville. She began serial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and he published Moby-Dick. Both authors followed these works with important fictional treatments of slavery in the mid-1850s: Melville with his novella “Benito Cereno” in 1855 and Harriet with her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp the next year. The two authors’ very different approaches to writing made both their critical and popular reputations as volatile as today’s stock market. Harriet’s direct condemnation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it the bestselling book in the world other than the Bible in the nineteenth century, while Melville’s dense language, irony, and ambiguous symbolism in Moby-Dick attracted few readers in his lifetime. His contemporaries also were not ready for the close crosscultural friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg or Melville’s implicit critique of American white supremacy when Ishmael says: “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Even when Melville dealt explicitly with slavery in “Benito Cereno,” his irony and complex character development were too indirect to interest abolitionists or many other readers. When Melville and Harriet died in the 1890s, she was by far the more famous of the two. By the 1920s, literary tastes were changing. Critics began to celebrate Melville’s psychological analysis and thematic ambiguities and turned away from what they considered the propaganda and sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Then, starting in the early 1980s, feminist criticism and cultural studies brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin back into the literary canon, where it stands today alongside Moby-Dick as one of the central works of mid-nineteenth century American literature. About the author:
Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Xavier University, retired in 2017 after teaching English there for 45 years. He specializes in American literature, especially nineteenth century, as well as the intersections of literature and peace studies. He has written articles on a variety of authors including Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, and Ursula Le Guin. He appears in the documentary film Becoming Harriet Beecher Stowe, scheduled for release in 2020 by Fourth Wall Films. But wait, there's more! Our volunteer community had a lot to share about what books and resources have made a difference for them in understanding the historical context of racial injustice. If you haven't seen it, check out We Keep Learning: Part I.
We are continual learners who strive to connect others to resources that our board, volunteers, and staff are finding helpful in that quest. We are currently reading, following, and listening to: Brynn:
Haley:
John: Films Amazing Grace (based on the origin of the hymn and the fight to end the British slave trade) Amistad (based on the famous 1839 rebellion on a slave ship and the aftermath) Almos’ a Man (based on Richard Wright’s short story; PBS American Short Story Film Series) The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (based on the novel by Ernest J. Gaines) Do the Right Thing (written, produced, and directed by Spike Lee) I Am Not Your Negro (documentary based on an unfinished manuscript by James Baldwin) Essays Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, especially the title essay Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me Eve Fairbanks, “The ‘Reasonable’ Rebels,” Washington Post, 8/29/2019 Autobiography Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (also Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X) Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (also the film) Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry Short Fiction James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple Novels Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon and Beloved Ernest J. Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying Octavia Butler, Kindred Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River Nnedi Okorafor, The Binti Trilogy: Binti, Binti: Home, Binti: The Night Masquerade Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah Poems Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask” Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” Experiences Seeing the signs for “White” and “Colored” as a child traveling in the South with my parents in the 1950s Teaching in the Xavier University E Pluribus Unum Program decades ago Listening to African American faculty and students at Xavier over the years Taking the 21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge from the Cleveland YWCA in 2019 Docenting and leading discussions at Harriet Beecher Stowe House |
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