Fiction and History

In my senior year of high school....the history teacher required us to purchase (cheaply, I must admit) a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin and read it as a class history project.

I read the book in approximately two weeks.  It's around 400 pages long, and a fictionalized piece on the period before the Civil War, and intended to be some explanation to the necessity of the Civil War. 

As I wrapped up the book on a Sunday evening....I sat there quietly and contemplated...it was a decent book but it is entirely fiction.  For a literature or English class, it would have been appropriate.  For a history class?  No.....it wasn't fitting because of the fictional nature. 

The book was designed by Ms. Stowe to be some emotional piece.....bringing you to the cause of opposing the south and slavery.  Even by age 17, I'd read well over a thousand pages of history material and non-fiction analysis of the period prior to 1865.  I'll admit that UTC's slant on things is probably 95-percent correct, but there is little to cover the economics of America from the early 1600s to 1865, and how you got to this particular situation in life.

In simple terms, it's a lousy book on history but a decent book for getting your emotions to oppose southern values of that era. 

The instructor?  My general belief from a decade after this mandatory reading was that students were supposed to get a negative view of the south, and understand the pro-Union position.  Slanted?  Well.....yes.

The same behavior occurring today?  My guess is that it's a common theme and repeats itself often. 

The sad thing is that we actually had a test (maybe ten questions) which came at the end of the reading assignment, and you actually had to remember around six to eight major characters.  I made up some cheat sheet, with three lines to each character and I had around four people who copied to sheet.....who obviously didn't read the book and needed background material to the test.  The sad thing to this is that you are basically memorizing fictional names and events....for a history exam.