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Harriet Elisabeth Beecher is born in Litchfield, Connecticut. She is one of ten children born to the famous Calvinist preacher Reverend Lyman Beecher and his wife, Roxana Foote Beecher.
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Roxana Beecher dies of tuberculosis. Reverend Lyman Beecher is now a widower with six surviving children. He remarries a year later and fathers four more children with his new wife.
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Inspired by the political debate over whether the new state of Missouri should be a free or slave state, Lyman Beecher begins preaching forcefully against slavery. Young Harriet, not yet ten years old, is deeply affected by his reformist message.
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Harriet Beecher moves with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father has a job at Lane Theological Seminary. She joins a literary group known as the Semi-Colon Club and begins to hone her writing style.
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Harriet Beecher marries Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Theological Seminary. Later in the same year, she gives birth to their first two children, twin girls named Eliza and Harriet.
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The couple's third child, Henry Ellis Stowe, is born.Henry is their first son.
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The fourth Stowe child, Frederick William, is born. He is their second son.
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Harriet Stowe gives birth to daughter Georgiana May. Her story collection The Mayflower is published.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe gives birth to the couple's sixth child, a baby called Charley. He dies of cholera at the age of eighteen months.
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The couple's seventh and last child, son Charles Edward, is born. Calvin Stowe becomes a professor at Bowdoin College, causing the family to move to Brunswick, Maine. The Stowes are upset about the Fugitive Slave Act, a new law that makes it a crime to assist anyone escaping slavery.
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Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is published. The horrors depicted in the novel outrage readers and spark heated political debate. Stowe becomes a hero of the growing abolitionist movement, while Southern critics attack her as a troublemaker. Calvin Stowe is appointed professor at the Andover Theological Seminary so the family moves to Andover, Massachusetts.
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After critics accuse her of overplaying the agony of slavery in her novel, Stowe publishes the companion book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin to rebut their criticisms. She is invited to speak about the novel in Great Britain.
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Stowe travels a second time to Europe to talk about slavery and Uncle Tom's Cabin. She publishes her second novel, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, which tells the story of an escaped slave.
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Harrriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Catharine Beecher, publish The American Woman's Home, a manual arguing for the respect and recognition of women's domestic work. Beecher Stowe also publishes the novel Old Town Folks.
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Unable to keep up with the cost of maintaining their home, the Stowes sell Oakholm and move. Their son Frederick, a Civil War veteran and struggling alcoholic, moves to California and is never heard from again.
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Older Sister Catherine Dies
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Calvin Stowe Dies
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Henry Ward Beecher Dies
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Georgiana dies
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Stowe dies at age 85.
