This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the trials of an enslaved man named Tom who accepts his suffering with Christian equanimity proved a boon to the abolitionist cause, though its actual depictions of Black people skimp on providing them with much humanity. Even in its time, the book was vulgarized via stage adaptations that reduced Stowe’s story to minstrelsy and her characters to caricatures. Today, a work that did so much to shake white northerners out of their complacency is remembered mostly as a slur. But in an essay for The Atlantic’s October issue, Clint Smith surprised himself by discovering the original power of the book—along with what remains so limited and prejudiced about it. His article uncovers the story of Josiah Henson, the “original” Uncle Tom, Stowe’s real-life inspiration for the character. In his …