Voices for Truth Discussion: Christmas Hope in Adversity

What could Christmas mean to people in the worst circumstances? What hope or at least reprieve could it signify? In our final meeting of the year we listen to voices for truth from two enslaved African Americans and a Jew remembering his time in Auschwitz.
Suggested reading:

• (1853), Chapter XV
• (1861), Chapter XXII
• Primo Levi, "Last Christmas of the War" (1978) - free login to read full article

About the Facilitators:

• Dr. John Getz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Xavier University and has been volunteering for the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House for many years.
• Dr. Mitch Nyawalo is Associate Professor, Gender and Diversity Studies Program
  Chair, Department of Race, Intersectionality, Gender, and Sociology

In 2024 our monthly discussion series will have a new name, Voices for Truth, and will feature all-new discussion topics.
We'll continue to focus on moments in American history when eloquent voices arose, often from the margins, to address important issues, usually related to social justice, in culture and society.
We’ll study the writings of many authors from the 19th and 20th centuries to determine

• how they discovered their voices,
• the forms they chose for expressing their voices,
• the needs both personal and societal to which they put those expressions,
• the effects their work had,
• how we can develop and enlist our own voices in service of our own values.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is our exemplar voice for truth. During her eighteen years in Cincinnati as a young adult (1832-1850), she discovered her voice as a writer, and in 1851, she decided to devote it to the anti-slavery cause. Horrified by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she wrote to editor Gamaliel Bailey: "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject [slavery], and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But now I feel that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."
The result, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the blockbuster novel that awakened many Northerners to the horrors of slavery and helped create the change of heart that would allow the Union to stand firm when the South ceded over slavery.

This series is sponsored by School Outfitters. ​

Host or Publisher Harriet Beecher Stowe House