Lecture 8: "Fictions of the Real"

Discussion of images of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (American and British editions) and John Brown (daguerreotypes, Jacob Lawrence’s John Brown series, Thomas Hovenden’s 1884 painting, “The Last Moments of John Brown”); continued discussion of Brown’s prison letters and white anti-racism; the issue of violence in abolitionist debates and Garrisonian non-violence; Kansas-Nebraska conflicts and popular sovereignty; the approach and arrival of the Civil War; the Constitution of the Confederate States of America; Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1860) and the destruction of the free labor ideal; the rise of American realist fiction.

American Protest Literature Lecture Videos (Harvard University) from "Literature and Arts A-86: American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac"