. >> bra deb stevenson, what was the impact of harriet beecher stow's uncle tom's cabin. >> guest: that was very impactful. very, very important. she really captured the brutality of the institution, and in so captured the imagination of the world. that became the most important book of the 19th century. it was read more than any other back except for the bible. it was translated in so many different languages, anyone chinese, and also -- it was so popular that the presses had to work literally 24/7 to produce enough copies of it. it was really a big, big hit, literary hit, of the 19th 19th century. of course the first -- some of the first move individual produced in early 20th century are based on unel tom's cabin, and -- uncle tom's cabin, even edison -- thomas edison has an early movie, silent movie, of uncle tom's cabin. >> did it sell in the south? >> guest: ed did. it was also abandoned in the -- it was also ban 'ed in the south, too. you had to read it to protest it, and also people who thought this is not good literature for the south, and the south had its own propaganda machin

stevenson was john kennedy's name. and this intrigued the hell of of him. and so he called the editor of the news section, a reporter names debs meyer and said who is -- who is doing the mentioning? and myers said, well, me. which is how we used to do it. you pull one of the these listed out of thin air and then all of a sudden somebody was being mentioned for vice president. but as we talked when we did the forum on the book listening in a couple of years ago, ellen, he had this ambition that had nothing to do with ideology, we're certain of that. he wasn't run -- we didn't want to run to double the minimum wage or achieve world peace or whatever. he talked in this off-the-record conversation, a tape of which was found many years later about wanting -- it is the teddy roosevelt answer, wanting to be in the arena, wanting to be in the certainty of things and dealing wentz huge issues of the day and making a difference in the positive direction but it is being there and being in the most -- the highest wrung. he said i think in the tape recording, it is like the harvard-yale game every weekend. and oddly parochial reference for