Making History: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Audience.

Popular reception of the nineteenth-century bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin generated an interest among early filmmakers that made Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel among the most adapted and influential of silent films. The 1925 Universal Pictures production by director Henry A. Pollard enhanced this popularity among audiences and influenced future filmmaking. The reception history that, in part, led to Pollard's enthusiasm to make his film is discussed in this essay with attention to nineteenth-century women readers, African American readers, British readers, and Southern readers who resisted the abolitionist text. Their familiarity with the text established the ground for the early twentieth-century work of filmmakers.Adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe have been among the most frequently produced of Twentieth Century films. These films built upon the familiarity of audiences with the popular novel and its stage adaptations. There have been some 100 adaptations. Versions appearing in the first decades of the century engaged racial stereotypes, including presenting characters in blackface. Films across the past half-century have critiqued the stereotypes while providing strongly positive images of the characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]