I just looked up Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is what was written about the story/book; "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day." The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change." In my humble opinion this would be a good book to read perhaps by older children with an explanation of the civil war and why. Most of the classics depict the era at the time of the writing and is history of that time. I believe it's a matter of using the books you describe as a teaching tool to relate that the books were what people believed at the time of the writing and that education has helped people to know the truth of the characters who are written about negatively. Without the negative we cannot show the positive, the truth about various racist writings. People need to understand the reality of the stories without destroying them. I agree with one speaker about the offensive statues. Leave the statues but add the historical truth to it. This is history but this is what we have learned since that time. I am a librarian in a small prison for males. We have a means for our patrons to object to any book in our library. I had Uncle Tom's Cabin in our collection until someone spilled something on it and it was removed. However, it was well read by our population and never objected to. I strive to purchase alternating view points and classics with historical value. We also have publication committees in all of our facilities. One of the things we analyze in a book is if the material promotes or encourages anything against any particular races, people, beliefs. Our panel consists of a number of departments in the facility so there is no one person making a decision to prevent personal prejudices which most people have.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin awoke empathy with its portrayals of families torn apart. Yes, the first family introduced to us looks white: that helped white readers identify with Eliza. Later (and this is the scene that stays with me most) we encounter the woman who drowns herself upon learning that she has been sold away from her husband, and her child sold away from both of them. Out of its historical context this book may not make sense. But its impact shouldn’t be minimized.

Ms. Venkatraman is not providing a fair representation of THE SECRET GARDEN. The brief excerpt she presents comes from a part of the book in which the Yorkshire character Martha rebukes Mary instantly for her prejudiced statement, in the context of a conversation about "black people" - a conversation in which Martha recounts all the positive things she has read about black people - and concludes with the statement that she was disappointed that Mary was not "black"!

And of course, the whole theme of THE SECRET GARDEN is the rejuvenation and transformation of Mary, from a nasty, spoiled, selfish little girl to a person capable of empathy and love.

As someone who also grew up in India and moved to the US, I do not understand what you hope to achieve by wiping away American history because it makes you uncomfortable. The thing is this attitude of pretending some unpleasant and disturbing history didn’t happen and letting our children skip lessons hasn’t served India well. Every time I go back I see history repeating itself. Entire mountains in the North East of India have disappeared so that the French can build roads somewhere else in the world in order for them to profit. More white colonialism. If you know your history you will understand why that is wrong. My grand father was a freedom fighter and my family never hid the violent history of British colonialism. This repeating of history is because India spent decades wiping their colonial history pretending that cities such as Mumbai didn’t have a significant role to play during the British Raj and was always a fishing village. When studying history in Mumbai as a student, they made Shivaji the true colonial freedom fighter and downplayed the Indian Independence movement. We now have white woke people turn around and tell us Indians that we are privileged even though our grand parents until very recently lived under colonialism and we were enslaved long after the civil war ended in the US. And plenty of Indians sit there and agree. It’s because their history is not taught to them. Mary in Secret Garden reminds us of the inhumanity of the British Raj. It doesn’t let white woke people pretend that the British Raj was benevolent. I don’t want my child to ever think that he is privileged so should shut up about the racism he faces as a brown child in a white country. What you are encouraging is an “I don’t see color” version of history and not one where it should be an opportunity for children to learn the true history of the world. Because it will let them understand the dominoes that fell for them to be where they are. Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it. And that’s exactly what’s happening in India.

The classics lay the foundations for Western literature, without which there would be no YA novels, many of which borrow from them. Writers from Homer to Shakespeare taught people to think. Maybe that's what the literary cancel culture is really afraid of. Or maybe they shouldn't watch Animaniacs, either?

Why not go to the root and root out icons of the mercantilist class who *ran* the slave trade and the convenient *branding* system that racism offered? And the slavebreeding that grew out of the eugenic racist slave codes made by the mercantilists. Established 1662.

The (almost literal) heirs to those triangulating mercantilists are those who run today's current eugenics industrial complex. Their ilk helped sponsor, among other things, the legalization of abortion in the land of "created equal" , and the maoist erasure of history in china that allowed forced abortions to proceed.

Oh and by the way the confederates (and Jim crow segregators) were virtually all democrat. Can we erase that monument?