Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Archives of Injustice

Ed Whitley’s chapter describes a project in which students study the curatorial work of Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” alongside current examples of digital activism to understand how groups mobilize and share information to effect change. Students “reverse engineer” the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by searching through digital archives of abolitionist texts and images to discover how Stowe’s inclusion of some materials and exclusion of others shaped her novel. Students then consider how social activists similarly sort, organize, select, and reject the documentary record of social injustice appearing online in real-time. As students compare historical periods and media forms, they reflect on the processes through which texts are created, disseminated, structured, stored, and used to change the world.