This is a report from a work in progress. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture began in 1998 to explore the capacities of electronic technology to tell the story of Stowe's story as a cultural phenomenon. Thanks to contributions from many different sources, including libraries and special collections around the country, it now contains thousands of texts and images, all or parts of over a dozen films, over forty playable songs, 3D images, and so on. But it will probably always be a work in progress. Trying to sum up the way Uncle Tom's Cabin pervaded American life, Henry James called it a "wonderful" flying fish. To me, struggling digitally to recreate its larger meaning as a cultural text, it has come to look more like Melville's Leviathan: too big and subtle and complex ever to be fully known. So this introduction to the project is what Ishmael would call "the draft of a draft," my attempt to offer some examples of what the archive contains and some interpretive suggestions about what patterns begin to emerge as we bring together material from so many different contexts. I'll spend the most time on the section of the archive called Uncle Tom's Cabin Onstage. This has turned out to be the messiest part of the story to recover and sort out: there were hundreds of companies of Tommers who gave thousands of performances from dozens of different scripts, most of which were never published, to millions of spectators in big city theaters, small town opera houses and traveling tents set up across the American landscape. It's likely that during the first 75 years after it was published, many more people saw Uncle Tom's Cabin enacted as a drama than read it as a novel, which means that to the cultural historian the spectacle of the "Tom Show," with its eye-catching posters, street parades, band concerts, and three-hour long performances, may be the most culturally significant text to attend to.

  Looking at Uncle Tom's Cabin Onstage will also enable us to document some of the ways that Stowe's story changed over time as a living part of American culture. It was remarkably long-lived as a popular novel. According to Thomas Gossett, for example, a survey of the branches of the New York Public Library done in 1899 identified it as the system's most frequently checked-out book. The text those readers read was essentially the same as the one that Jewett & Company first published half a century earlier, but it must have spoken to that generation differently than it spoke to its original readers. It would be interesting to find out exactly what editions of the novel were on the Library's shelves in 1899. By then the text was out of copyright, and had been brought out by dozens of different publishing companies. Most of these late 19th-century editions were illustrated, many quite copiously. The archive contains all the illustrations from 19 of these books, and the differences between the illustrations in different editions and from different eras provide one kind of access to the range of meanings Stowe's one text had for different classes and generations of readers. We can illustrate this point with a pair of images, chosen to italicize patterns of difference. First, the cover of the deluxe "Illustrated Edition" with hundreds of pictures by Hammatt Billings, brought out by Jewett in time for Christmas, 1852 (below left). Next, from the other end of the period we cover in the archive, the titlepage illustration from the edition that Coward-McCann brought out in 1929, with 61 pictures by James Daugherty (below right).

   

  Because it was illustrated, even the first edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin was a multi-media event. Stowe's text went on to be adapted in many ways – to other media, to specific audiences, and to new cultural moments or concerns. Comparing these acts of adaptation with Stowe's text and with each other offers a powerful way to catch America in the process of using Stowe's novel to serve its shifting ideological agendas. One section of the archive that is already larger than I anticipated, and yet still incomplete, is our collection of children's books derived from the novel. Two of these appeared within a year of the novel's publication; both were written in Great Britain, though Jewett republished both in the United States. The earliest American-authored children's versions I've located begin appearing much later, around 1890, and thus, while consciously revising the novel for young readers, also indicate how the story was revised to suit the needs of a new era. As a way of epitomizing what I'm using the word "adaptation" to represent, and as a kind of text-based prologue to the "Tom Show," we can look briefly at The Young Folks Uncle Tom's Cabin.

  Written by Grace Duffie Boylan, and illustrated by Ike Morgan, this text was first published in 1901, then re-issued a number of times, by several different publishers, over the next two decades. As all the children's versions do, it abridges Stowe's text – but Boylan also added a new last chapter. It's set shortly after the end of the Civil War, on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky where Stowe's novel begins. As in the novel, George has freed his slaves, but they are still living in the same quarters they occupied as slaves; having stood by the white Shelbys as a "guard of honor" during the dangers of the War, they now work for the George and his mother as "hired hands." Boylan, however, is not interested in how their lives may have changed. As in many of the adaptations written, staged and filmed after the Civil War, the main emphasis of Boylan's ending is on representing the idea of the re-united States of America. For Chapter 15 she brings Miss Ophelia south to visit Mrs. Shelby, and the embrace of these two women – the former slave-owner and the former abolitionist – symbolizes the healing of the national trauma of war. The national trauma of slavery, on the other hand, is simply erased. Accompanying Ophelia is Topsy, Topsy as the respectable, educated, Christian missionary we glimpse at the end of Stowe's narrative. The return that Boylan writes for Topsy is what a 19th-century missionary would have labeled a reversion. The day Ophelia and Topsy arrive the Shelbys' hands put on a "negro festival" in the quarters, and as soon as Topsy hears the banjo, "she was up and taking a part in the merry dance with all of her old time spirit." Ophelia is shocked, but Mrs. Shelby is delighted: she "looked with amused eyes at the girl, who was leaping and whirling, with shining teeth and eyes," and tells Ophelia to leave Topsy alone, that Topsy "is on her native heath now . . . and this is the Topsy that I hoped to see." While the northern and southern ladies embrace as equals, it is ultimately the hopes of the former slave-owner that determine the identity and place of the African American.

   

  Boylan's new ending – Topsy and other former slaves performing the "famous songs and dances of the plantation" – unfortunately leads directly to the theatrical history of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the novel that Stowe wrote there are two scenes of slaves dancing: little Harry does a "Jim Crow" routine for Mr. Shelby and Haley in the first chapter, and Topsy, also introduced under the rubric "Jim Crow," dances a breakdown that shocks Ophelia while delighting St. Clair. In both cases, Stowe's use of the term "Jim Crow" tips her hand: writing to arouse sympathy for the slaves, she knew she had to take into her account the minstrel show stereotype of the "happy darky," whose plantation frolicks, whose exotic songs and dances seemed to prove that blacks were content with their lot as slaves. Harry and Topsy's dancing meets the expectations of the white audience for whom blackface minstresly, especially as epitomized by the wildly popular T.D. Rice, defined their idea of plantation life. Stowe, however, no sooner evokes this stereotype than she brilliantly subverts it. When the two men who've been entertained by Harry's contortions sell him away from his mother, and when Topsy's wildness is revealed to be both the product of her abuse and redeemable by a combination of Eva's love and Ophelia's pedagogy, the "happy darky" mask is removed to reveal the human faces under it. When slaves sing in Stowe's novel, they sing spirituals as part of a religious meeting. There are no scenes in the novel of slaves dancing in groups.

       

  One of the first things that happened when Americans began adapting Stowe's novel to the stage, however, is that dancing played a larger role. The most popular script was the version George Aiken wrote for the Howard family; it premiered in Troy, New York, in 1852, and then set all kinds of new standards for theatrical success at New York City's National Theatre in 1853-1854. Mr. Howard wrote several songs for Topsy (played by his wife), Eva (played by his daughter) and Tom (played by a white actor in blackface). Mrs. Howard's representation of Topsy proved so popular that she went on to play the part almost continuously for the next 30 years. The breakdown she danced to a song titled "Ise So Wicked" invariably stopped the show, and even in the scenes of Topsy in Vermont that Aiken interpolated into Stowe's story, the stereotypical "Jim Crow" elements associated with her character remain unsubverted. Playbills from various productions during the 1850s make it clear that onstage the Topsy character, with her singing and dancing, competed with Tom and Eva for center stage in the minds of white northern audiences. Melodrama, of course, literally means a drama with music, and any 19th-century audience at a dramatization would expect music to be a part of the performance. But the fate of Topsy's character onstage indicates how the demands of another medium can control acts of adaptation: onstage Topsy was recaptured by the performative power of the stereotype from which Stowe's novelistic narrative had tried to rescue her, forced to keep singing and dancing to satisfy the appetite of live audiences for a particular kind of entertainment.

       

  Does this mean that northern play-goers in the 1850s shared the white supremacist complacencies of Mrs. Shelby in Boylan's children's book? A smiling, dancing black has always been a very comfortable image for the white American conscience, and minstrel shows were as popular as Uncle Tom's Cabin with antebellum audiences in the North. It's even likely that one of the play's attractions for the many respectable church-goers it turned into first-time theater-goers was the chance to sample a form of minstrel entertainment under the sign of Tom's Christian piety. But as the case of H.J. Conway's dramatic adaptation reveals, the antebellum North insisted on maintaining a distinction between Uncle Tom's Cabin onstage and minstrelsy.

  Conway's dramatization premiered at the Boston Museum in November, 1852, just two months after Aiken's version began in Troy. The Conway script opens with a scene of the slaves at the Shelby plantation singing and dancing in honor of little George's birthday. That is one of the play's two elaborate musical numbers; the second occurs in Act Four, at the slave warehouse, while Tom and St. Clare's other slaves wait to be sold. In Stowe's text Emmeline and her mother sing a funereal hymn for comfort in the shadow of the auction block. In Conway's adaptation, the "slaves ready for a sale" perform a "Plantation jig" with "banjo accompaniment," making the singing and dancing at the auctioneer's just as carefree and joyous as the celebration in Act One. The Conway version was very popular with Boston audiences, and it is the adaptation that P.T. Barnum brought to New York a year later and produced in his American Museum to compete for the crowds packing into the National Theatre. Although Barnum advertised the play as "the only truly sensible [dramatic] version of Mrs. Stowe's great work," reviewers from both the New York Tribune and the abolitionist Liberator angrily protested the way it violated "the spirit of the story as told by Mrs. Stowe." According to the Tribune, Conway had "degraded it to a mere burlesque negro performance" and created "a play to which no apologist for Slavery could object." Although this version was filling seats at his Museum, Barnum took these criticisms seriously enough to make alterations in the play; two weeks after it opened the Tribune critic was back at Barnum's invitation to review the revised production, and publically gave his overall approval to "the reform[s], especially in Act Four: "the auction scene is rendered in a much more suitable and impressive manner." Conway's play ran for four months at Barnum's. The Boston Museum continued to produce it at least through the 1870s, without incorporating any of the Barnum revisions. But in both the head-to-head competition in New York in 1853 and for the rest of the decade, the Aiken dramatization proved the most popularly acceptable version. Later in the 1850s Barnum even brought it to his Museum.

       

  Aiken's dramatic adaptation also provided the basic dramatic structure for most of the thousands of "Tom Show" productions that kept bringing Stowe's story before live audiences from the 1870s until well into the 20th century. During that half century, however, the Aiken text itself was repeatedly adapted. As a form of mass entertainment, of course the show had continually to be brought up to date. When Bailey's circus merged with Barnum's in 1880, for example, the Tommers kept pace with "Barnum & Bailey's" by creating "Double Uncle Tom's Cabin Companies," featuring two Topsys and two Markses on stage at the same time. As I started working in theater collections, however, and pulling together material for the archive, I confess I was surprised to discover the extent to which, by the end of the 1870s, the "Tom Shows" had turned Stowe's protest against slavery into a kind of nostalgic tribute to it. The image to keep our attention focused on is the scene of singing and dancing slaves.

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  It's not possible to say exactly when any actual African Americans, as opposed to white performers in blackface, first appeared on stage in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even in the 20th century it remained unusual to cast blacks in any of the major parts, including Tom and Topsy. But by 1875 a number of productions included "Jubilee Singers" in their companies. This too is an example of the dynamic of mass entertainment: the popular success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers during their fund-raising tours in the first half of the decade produced a fad among white audiences for "jubilee singing" that generated a host of imitators. Since Stowe's novel already contained slaves singing spirituals, and since its dramatizations already contained songs, it was a fairly short step to bring into the performance a chorus or quartet of African American singers (typically identified in Tom Show advertising as "students"). As far as I've been able to reconstruct the nature of these shows, the black performers took center stage only between acts; during the play itself, although they were seen as well as heard, they were offstage, and their role was similar to that of the band – to provide musical accompaniment; during Eva's death, for instance, to ask the sweet chariot to swing low and carry her home. Although dramatizations of Uncle Tom remained popular throughout the Civil War, there is evidence that by the early 1870s there was a decline in the public appetite for them; the way so many different companies hastened to feature "jubilee singers" in their promotional material suggests that giving the show what amounts to a new soundtrack revived its fortunes with white audiences. And when, in early 1875, a production at New York's Niblo's Garden using the Aiken text began referring to "negro dances" as well as "new songs" in its ads, and in its playbills to a "Real Plantation Scene" in Act Two, we find the what could be called the first arrival on the cultural scene of the "Tom Show." One way to understand the effect of the change is to note how the Tommers turned the word "jubilee" inside out. The Fisk singers took the term from the Old Testament, where it signified emancipation. In the world of the "Tom Show," however, it came to stand for life as a slave.

       

  Mr. and Mrs. Howard's company, the first to stage Aiken's script, was among the first to include "jubilee singers." Their next adaptation may have been the first fully to exploit the theatrical and cultural possibilities of bringing African Americans into the performance when, about a year after adding small ensembles of black singers, they brought out a new show that put scores of black performers at a time on stage. The best guide to these productions I've found so far are the ads for them in the Amusement sections of newspapers like the New York Herald. We have to remember that they are advertisements, and so undoubtedly exaggerate, but they nonetheless reflect a truth about the Howards' ability to give white audiences what they wanted. According to announcements that appeared in New York papers on May 21, 1876, the new show at the Park Theatre would star Mrs. Howard "in her original role of TOPSEY" – but in "a new version . . . of that greatest and most successful of all American plays." In their ads the Howards tied their new version to the 1876 Centennial Exposition that was about to open in Philadelphia in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. They added, significantly, that this version was "adapted to the sentiment of the times." What was specifically new was the expanded role of Slavin's Georgia Jubilee Singers: not only will they sing – they "will be introduced in characteristic scenes in OLD-TIME PLANTATION MELODIES of pleasant memory." The show was a huge hit: as Harry Birdoff notes, the Howards came to New York for a run of two weeks and instead wound up staying twenty-seven. And according to the story told by the ads, over this run this "new version" just grew and grew. By October, 1877, when the Howard troupe opened at the Grand Opera House, the "ENTIRELY NEW PLANTATION SCENE" would be enacted by "TWO HUNDRED TWO HUNDRED GENUINE SOUTHERN COLORED PEOPLE."

In no time, this "plantation scene" became as much a part of what Uncle Tom's audiences expected to see as Eliza crossing the ice or Eva's ascension to Heaven. Another early example of this expanded "Tom Show" was the "SPECTACULAR REVIVAL" that Jarrett & Palmer brought to New York in February, 1878, after a two-week run in Philadelphia seen by "over 60,000 people." Ads claim its "Plantation Festival" was enacted by "FOUR HUNDRED GENUINE FREEDMEN, perfectly familiar with the plaintive melodies, dances and characteristic doings of the cotton fields"; they were "led by famous colored specialty artists, including HORACE WESTON, the Banjoist, the LOUISIANA TROUBADOUR QUARTET, the ECCENTRIC CORPS OF COONS, SARAH WASHINGTON, Camp Meeting Shouter" and accompanied by "two BANDS OF JUBILEE SINGERS, &c." According to a New York Times review, this production "lasted for more than four hours," but the packed house loved it. Especially they loved the "negro songs and melodies" – the Times reviewer says the play "was lengthened to such an extent by the encores that followed every performance of the colored artists."

  The word "genuine" appears repeatedly in the promtional material for the "Tom Shows." The performers in the plantation scenes aren't just "colored," but "genuine colored." Whites blacked up with cork was still the norm on the minstrel stage, but more than a distinction between "Tom Show" and minstrel show was being signified by this attestation to "genuineness." Ads also stressed that these "genuine colored" performers were "freedmen" – or as a program for Mrs. Howard's company in Boston in 1877 puts it, actually "had been slaves before the war." I wish I knew more about the real black men and women who put on this part of the "Tom Shows" – how many had been enslaved and how, in those instances, they felt about being paid to perform as "slaves" – but I've been unable to find any mode of access to their story. Yet in the phrase "perfectly familiar with . . . the doings of the cotton field," we can hear what mattered about these staged re-enactments of the old plantation: the claim that they were true to historical facts. "Realistic" is another word that appears over and over in association with these scenes, as when an April 1875 ad for the Fifth Avenue Theatre promises "SCORES OF FREEDMEN IN THE REALISTIC PLANTATION SCENE," or when an October 1877 ad that promises "TWO HUNDRED GENUINE SOUTHERN COLORED PEOPLE" calls their performance "THE MOST REALISTIC SCENE ever presented on any stage." As these plantation scenes grew even more elaborate over time, accessories were added to heighten the sense of realism: real cotton plants, for instance, and what a publicity flyer calls "a genuine cotton gin and press in full operation." One of the standard marketing ploys by which the Tommers kept spectators coming back year after year was the claim that the play was a living lesson in American history; central to that strategy was the specific claim that their staging of the "plantation" was an authentic re-presentation of "slavery," a "vivid illustration" of "slave life before the war."

           

  In the advertising card that C.H. Smith's Uncle Tom's Cabin Company sent out in 1882 to announce its forthcoming engagement at the Park Garden Theatre in Providence, for example, audiences were promised a chance to witness "A Genuine Cotton Plantation!" On the other side of the card they provided an image of how this will appear for the entertainment of theater-goers, with the caption "Life in the Sunny South."

   

  There is a history to this kind of representation, though not the one claimed for it, not the real experience of slaves inside the institution of slavery. Groups of dancing "happy darkies" appear on the covers of minstrel show sheet music during the 1830s and 40s, when slavery was legal, and continue to dominate the iconography of minstrelsy for decades after slavery's abolition. Such groups are frequently described as well in the "Anti-Tom" novels that the pro-slavery enemies of Stowe's book wrote during the 1850s. By the end of the 1870s, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin itself was being used to promote this hallucinatory, racist depiction of slavery.

       

  The Tom Show pheonomenon preceded the fictions of southern writers like Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page that began appearing in the mid-1880s. In a story like Page's "Marse Chan," first published in the Century magazine in 1884 and commonly cited as the first "plantation tale," a northern outsider is taught about slavery from a former slave, who calls his years of enslavement "de best times" he ever had. In the Tom Show's plantation scenes, a northern audience is shown what purports to be a realistic re-creation of slavery put on by performers who are identified as genuine former slaves. And all of this, of course, is being staged under the apparent auspices of "Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin," a text whose moral, religious and abolitionist credentials were unimpeachable. Anyone going to see Uncle Tom's Cabin at any point during its long theatrical run knew that the story started from the position that slavery was wrong. After the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, however, the question of slavery's rightness or wrongness – so angrily debated in the 1850s, so violently fought over on battlefields in the 1860s – had been answered. Now that it had been abolished, all Americans could agree that slavery was wrong. But what was slavery like? What did its existence mean? How is it to be understood and reckoned with as an inescapable fact of the nation's history? These questions remained very much alive, and provide the context in which to locate the rise of the Tom Show and the plantation tale as cultural texts.

  As the Howards' advertisement for their "new version" put it in 1876, the Tom Show was very "well adapted to the sentiment of the times." Like Conway's dramatization, they included minstrel songs and dances even in the auction scene where Tom and Emmeline are sold to Legree. But now, unlike the 1850s, I haven't found any objections to the incongruity of representing slaves as carefree and joyous in the shadow of the auction block. All the reviews I've found are full of praise for the way "the colored artists" perform their "negro songs and melodies," for what an 1878 review in the New York Times called "the particularly happy illustration of the plantation scenes." Another Times critic, nothing the success of four different productions that were playing simultaneously in the city in the spring of 1878, noted that Uncle Tom's Cabin "has again become the fashion." It's probably safe to say that in the late 1870s alone, many times more people saw these new versions than read Stowe's novel in the 1850s. The archive's maps of the identified performances during the 1870s resemble the graphic representations of a spreading infectious virus – and as more troupes of Tommers were organized in the succeeding decades, repeatedly carrying the Tom Show in trains and wagons and eventually trucks across still more of the country, its hold on the nation's attention multiplied still further.

  1876, the year this "fashion" began, was marked not just by the centennial. It also witnessed the collapse of Reconstruction. The elections of that year proved what had been increasingly evident since the Freedmen's Bureaus were closed down: that the re-united states of America had abandoned the proposition that the wrong of slavery had to be redressed by fundamental economic and political change. This turning of the majority American culture away from the claims of former slaves suggests why white audiences in the North as well as unreconstructed white Southerners would want to turn back, nostalgically, to the old plantation. The process by which the myth of the Old South arose out of the ashes of wartime defeat has been well explored by recent historians, particularly David W. Blight and Heather Cox Richardson. In Race and Reunion, Blight eloquently traces how the need to heal the wounds of the War drove white Americans, North and South, to repress its causes, to forget the wrongs suffered by and the rights still owed to African Americans. In The Death of Reconstruction, Richardson argues convincingly that economic anxieties about entitlement made white northerners increasingly less sympathetic to the plight of freedmen and increasingly more receptive to the stereotypical images that had their origins in pro-slavery ideology. Neither historian considers the "Tom Show" as part of the cultural evidence they examine, though doing so would support their analyses. Blight, for instance, might find a lot to say about the fact that by the end of the 1870s the "new version" of Stowe's story (unlike antebellum dramatizations) could be successfully performed in the South – though Southern antipathy to all the cultural forms Stowe's story took remained strong at least until the Civil Rights Movement.

  Including the "Tom Show" in our historical memory provides an earlier origin for the acts of cultural evasion that Blight and Richardson describe, and also suggests one other reason for the triumph of an unReconstructed view of slavery in the aftermath of war and abolition. When Stowe's novel appeared in 1852, the Mason-Dixon line divided the United States in a North and a South, which gave white Northern readers the privilege of blaming the evils of slavery that Stowe's novel dramatized on "them" – the slave-owning South, the people on the other side of that line. After 1865, however, slavery was inescapably part of "our" national past. It was no longer possible to draw a line between the majority culture's collective conscience and the 250-year history of slavery in America. Paradoxically, slavery became more of a problem for the North after it was abolished in the South, when it became a fact that haunted our history. That, at least, might explain the equally paradoxical adaptation of the story Stowe wrote into something like "Springtime for Hitler," that musical tribute to Nazi Germany that furnishes the dark joke at the center of Mel Brooks' Producers. The Tom Shows don't completely erase the suffering of slaves: they almost always climaxed with Tom's violent death. But with their musical plantation scenes, the shows pretty unequivocally insist that unless slaves were unlucky enough to get a terrible master like Simon Legree, they were entirely contented with their place as slaves. Nor was slavery a systemized injustice for which the nation had to atone. As a spectacle the Tom Show was many things to the people in its audience: action-packed melodrama, tear-jerker, religious experience, temperance propaganda. But after abolition, it also served to connect the majority culture with a very reassuring image of the past. The particular authority of Uncle Tom's Cabin – its associations with the anti-slavery movement and the war fought to free the slave – made it the perfect vehicle with which to give white Americans a guilt-free, in fact a downright entertaining vision of history.

  But at a Tom Show anxieties about slavery were merely repressed, not exorcised, which is why white Americans had to keep coming back to the spectacle again and again, year after year. This brings us to the next chapters in the cultural reincarnations of Uncle Tom: the adaptations made possible by the new technologies of the turn into the 20th century. Altogether between 1903 and 1927, at least nine films titled Uncle Tom's Cabin were made in the United States, making it the most-filmed story of the silent era, and probably still the most frequently filmed American novel. The archive includes the four silent films that have survived. The 1903 Edison-Porter film – which has at least as much right to be called "America's first movie" as Edison's Great Train Robbery – uses the stage sets, costumes and many of the theatrical gestures of the Tom Show circa 1900. The movie is only 14 minutes long – that was the length of a full-length film in those days – and yet more than two of those minutes are devoted to three separate scenes of African Americans dancing, including a hurried number at the start of the auction sequence that includes a game of craps. The film's subtitle is Slavery Days, which is its way of making the familiar claim of historical authenticity. In 1903, in large part because of the way Tommers had so repeatedly reinscribed the images of dancing slaves on American retinas, the film's scenes probably did seem realistic.

       

  The advent of moving pictures gives us a partial window into what early 20th century audiences saw at the Tom Shows. Edison's other great contribution to America's entertainment industry, the phonograph, makes it possible for us to hear the way Uncle Tom's Cabin sounded in that era. The earliest "records" were the Edison cylinders. The archive includes digitizations of a 1904 cylinder called "The Flogging Scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin" and one from 1910 entitled "The Entrance of Topsy". The words "Scene" and "Entrance" make it clear that if you bought the cylinders, it wouldn't be Stowe's text you'd hear, but a version of its dramatization; there's no way to tell, however, how accurately they capture the way the scenes were in fact performed on stage. Songs written about the novel or for its dramatizations date back to 1852. Our playable versions of the songs written before 1910 were recorded in the 21st century, but we also have a number of original recordings from 1910 and afterward. "At Uncle Tom's Cabin Door" was written in 1912, recorded by William J. Halley & Orchestra, and released by Victor Records in 1913. Though its lyrics purport to be about "those happy days before Emancipation," what the song records is how much, half a century later, America has embraced the big lie about the old plantation that we've been examining. There are no words in "Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Dream Picture," written by Lampe and released by Edison's company on cylinder in 1911, but its four minutes set that lie to music. This was the first cylinder I acquired, and since the University of Virginia didn't have a way to play it, we had to send it off for digitization. That took several months. While waiting, I occasionally wondered what the "Dream Picture" might consist of. Several images came to mind: Tom's dream of heaven, for instance, or of freedom. When we finally received the digitization, however, I realized that the dream Lampe celebrates is not Tom's, but white America's. The piece is a medley of classics from the repertoire of minstrelsy, including "My Old Kentucky Home" (which Stephen Foster actually wrote first as "Poor Uncle Tom"), "The Old Folks at Home," "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia," and "Old Black Joe." I suppose I should have heard that coming. But I confess the minstrel tune that Lampe chose to bring the medley to a rousing climax was one that I couldn't have imagined.

   

  Uncle Tom's Cabin and "Dixie" – that makes a particularly ironic note to end on. But I would like to add one further point. To me, electronic technology is meant to supplement and enhance the reading of literature, not to supplant it. So as a teacher and a digital humanist I always hope to use it to lead back to and into the text. In one sense we've gotten very far away from Stowe's novel. Her Topsy, for example, ends as a formally-trained Christian missionary in Africa. In all the illustrated editions of the novel we've located, by the way, I've seen only one picture of Topsy in that character, drawn by E.W. Kemble for an 1892 Houghton-Mifflin edition. In the "Tom Show," on the other hand, as in Boylan's children's book, Topsy just keeps "acting like a loon" at the center of an ensemble of dancing slaves. All these texts, however, including Stowe's, protect white American culture from a moral and political confrontation with the place blacks deserve in American society or with the legacy of slavery in American history. As we've seen, the Tom Shows transformatively adapt Stowe's narrative, often in ways that do violence to her book. But perhaps those Tommers couldn't have made the novel into a play that amused and flattered white prejudices so successfully if the novel hadn't already done so in its own terms. It was Stowe herself, for example, who created the Shelby plantation and the St. Clair estates, which might have made the unhappiness of the slaves at Legree's seem the exception rather than the rule. It certainly made it possible for Joel Chandler Harris to say, in the first Uncle Remus book, that Stowe "painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him."

   

  Here's one last visual image, taken from Stowe's own novel – from the lavish illustrated edition that her publisher brought out at the end of 1852. It is the last image in the book. Like the scenes of slaves dancing in groups, it isn't literally in the novel. But like the Tom Show's use of dancing slaves as a comforting image of the national past, this image of emancipated slaves disappearing once and for all over a fantasized mountain range to a wish-fulfillment "Africa" provides Stowe's readers with a comforting picture of an all-white national future. It gives us a way to see the "dream pictures" and racial illusions that Stowe's novel and its cultural reincarnations helped to sustain as well as to challenge.