June 5

On the 5th in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly began its serialization in the newspaper the National Era. It would take ten months to complete the run, at which time it was published in book form. In the first year, the book would sell over 300,000 copies in the United States and more than tens times that number internationally.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 moved Stowe (pictured left) to write the anti-slavery novel.
Contemporaries of Stowe felt that she had created the main character in her book by reading the work of Josiah Henson (pictured right), a freed slave from Maryland living in Canada who published his memoirs of life in slavery, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself in 1849.
By 1854, Stowe could be proud that her book had been translated into 60 different languages, including Yiddish.