Unit 3: The Secret Road to Freedom (1ère G_gr2)

 Harriet Beecher Stowe

The document under study is a video that promotes the movie entitled “The Abolitionists”, released in 2013. In this extract, we learn about the famous abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white American woman who lost her son to cholera. As a result, she decided to write a novel about slavery to connect her own loss of a child with the slave mothers who had their children taken away from them. In fact, in her book entitled “Uncle Tom’s cabin”, she humanizes the experience of slavery by giving her slave characters emotions. As a consequence, her book won over many Americans who changed their minds on the ethics of slavery. Moreover, her novel was very successful, when it was published in 1852, 245,000 copies were sold. To finish with, the title of her book refers to the place where the slaves lived on the planation compared to the Big House of their slave masters.

Homework: Learn the lesson.