next day with more young people. The story went viral, through word of mouth
and through news media attention, and within weeks the sit-ins spread
throughout much of the United States. The story’s spread was not entirely
unplanned, Polletta concludes. Activists tried to promulgate the story, but they
were not in tight control of the social movement, which was largely viral. The
word sit-in, coined in 1960, was a true epidemic, with a hump-shaped curve
resembling the hump-shaped pattern through time that we see in disease
epidemics (see Figure A.1). Use of the term sit-in, as revealed by Google
Ngrams, grew until 1970, ten years later. In the interim, the movement spawned
the word teach-in, which had a similar epidemic curve, though less intense and
fading earlier.
Several generations earlier, another story had raised white people’s sympathy
for the plight of black people in the United States. It appeared in Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book was the most successful novel
in the nineteenth-century United States, selling over a million copies when the
country’s population was much smaller and less able to afford books. It tells the
story of an older slave, Uncle Tom, who loves children and who tells stories to
Little Eva, the white slave owner’s innocent little daughter. Eva, still a child, dies
of a sudden illness, but not before asking to have locks of her hair cut off and
distributed to the slaves, with a wish that she will see them again in heaven. Tom
is separated from his wife and children and sold to a vicious slave owner, Simon
Legree, who beats him mercilessly for refusing orders to beat another slave.
The book contains some highly evocative scenes, including one of a slave
mother, Eliza, fleeing with her four-year-old son after she is told that he will be
sold. Pursued by the slave owner’s bloodhounds, Eliza clutches her son as she
struggles to cross the dangerous ice of the Ohio River. A hit song (in the form of
sheet music), “Eliza’s Flight,” appeared in 1852, and numerous plays, called
“Tom shows,” typically including the Eliza scene, sprang up all over the
northern United States, likely infecting far more people than the printed book
did. The Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, and Eliza narratives played an unmistakable
role in the North’s decision to invade the South after it seceded. The Civil War
began in 1861, a historic event with enormous human and economic
significance.

On the Universality of Narrative
Anthropologists, who research the behavior of diverse cultures around the world,
have observed a class of behaviors that they call “universals,” found in every
human society if not in every individual. Anthropologist Donald E. Brown
identified a universal that is important to this book: that people “use narrative to
explain how things came to be and to tell stories.”4 In fact, the narrative is a
uniquely human phenomenon, not shared by any other species. Indeed, some
have suggested that stories distinguish humans from animals, and even that our
species be called Homo narrans (Fisher, 1984), Homo narrator (Gould, 1994),
or Homo narrativus (Ferrand and Weil, 2001). Might this description be more
accurate than Homo sapiens (i.e., wise man)? It is more flattering to think of
ourselves as Homo sapiens, but not necessarily more accurate.
In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato appreciated the importance of
narratives; he wrote his philosophy in the form of fictional dialogues featuring
the celebrity Socrates. The narrative force helps to explain what makes his work
still popular today. In his dialogue Republic, written around 380 BCE, Plato has
a character argue that the government should censor popular stories. Talking
with Adeimantus, Socrates says:
I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but
there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too
excitable and effeminate by them.5
In his book De Oratore (On the Orator, 55 BCE), itself a book about narrative,
the Roman senator Cicero says:
Nature forms and produces men to be facetious mimics or story-tellers; their
look, and voice, and mode of expression assisting their conceptions.6
Other species have culture, but narratives do not transmit that culture. How is
it that other animals learn fundamental survival skills, such as fearing specific
predators? Experiments have shown that monkeys are genetically predisposed to
fear snakes, and birds are genetically predisposed to be afraid of hawks.
Moreover, experiments have shown that monkeys and birds acquire fear when
they observe others attack their own species. They also acquire fear, even lasting
fear, when they observe circumstances that arouse fear among others in their