.The Battle of Little Bighorn, June 1876

Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong Custer, the commander of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, led one of the U.S. Army columns that moved along Montana’s Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876. Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull, energized by a dream that seemed to foretell a great victory by his people, aligned with Crazy Horse; Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho leaders, to attack the Americans, who were decidedly more vulnerable by Custer’s decision to split them into small detachments. Two of them were nearly destroyed; Custer’s force of 210 men was annihilated–and although there are no eyewitness accounts of what actually happened, the battle–really a series of engagements–was a great, but Pyrrhic victory, for Sitting Bull’s tribal coalition. Custer’s death led to renewed U.S. determination to crush Native American independence—forever.

For more information about the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn (2010).

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First Serial Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, June 1851

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, Harriet Beecher moved with her large family to Cincinnati in 1832, which positioned them—all fervent abolitionists—into the ongoing cruelties and struggles of slavery. Harriet—in particular, who married Calvin Stowe in 1836, witnessed race riots that targeted free and incarcerated African Americans, met with many of its victims, and worked with other abolitionists to provide them with aid to escape across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state, and Ohio, a free one. Although the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outlawed the “exchanges,” they did not stop, and Stowe was galvanized to write what she expected to be a small—and minor—abolitionist serial novel called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The first installment was published on June 5, 1851, in the abolitionist paper, The National Era. Moved by an emotional loss after the death of her infant son, and by a vision Stowe claimed to have experienced about a long-suffering slave who died after taking communion, the serial tracked the tribulations of an enslaved black man—Tom or Uncle Tom—who was intended to elicit sympathy and condescension from white abolitionists. After an enthusiastic reception, Stowe published a larger version in March of 1852, that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, revved up abolitionist fervor in the years prior to the Civil War, and—allegedly—prompted Abraham Lincoln to say, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

For more information about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Joan D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1995).

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Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.

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History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize, an annual award for high quality, 7th to 9th grade-level books dealing with important events and personalities in American history.