The CBS Sports Network is a sports-oriented cable channel operated as a part of the sports division of CBS. It launched in 2002 as the National College Sports Network (later CSTV), a multi-platform media brand which encompassed its TV network, collegesports.com, and a network of websites operated for the athletic departments of 215 college and universities.

CSTV was acquired by CBS in 2005, maintaining its original scope (and re-branded as the CBS College Sports Network) until 2011, when it was re-branded as just the CBS Sports Network to position it as a competitor to other mainstream sports channels.

History[link]

The network's roots began in 1999 when Chris Bevilacqua approached co-founders of Classic Sports Network Brian Bedol and Stephen D. Greenberg – at that time, running Fusient Media Ventures, a New York-based sports and media company – with the idea for a network featuring all college sports all the time.

The network launched as the National College Sports Network in June 2002 and was then renamed College Sports Television (CSTV) in February 2003. From their headquarters and studio operations at Chelsea Piers in New York City, CSTV was the first independent cable channel to appear nationwide, on the DirecTV satellite system, at launch.

In November 2005, it was purchased by CBS Corporation for $325 million.^[1] On January 3, 2008, it was announced that CSTV would be integrated into CBS Sports, with Tony Petitti, executive vice president and executive producer of CBS Sports taking over operational day-to-day management of CSTV, which would be overseen by Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports. CSTV co-founder Brian Bedol would become a senior advisor to CBS Corporation president and CEO Leslie Moonves. Petitti has since left CBS to take on the same role for the MLB Network.

In the fall of 2006, CSTV launched more than 100 broadband channels dedicated to college sports, which feature more than 10,000 live events. The subscription/pay-per-view service, called CBS College Sports XXL, and its portfolio of broadband channels in its All-Access suite, include coverage of Notre Dame, Southern California, Kansas, Ohio State and North Carolina.

CBS reorganization[link]

On February 12, 2008, it was announced that, as part of the ongoing integration of CSTV into CBS Sports, that the network would be renamed the CBS College Sports Network on March 16, 2008, coinciding with CBS's coverage of the NCAA's basketball tournament. Studio shows are still based at Chelsea Piers, and did not move to the CBS Broadcast Center or to another location in Manhattan. As part of the re-launch, the network added a new news program, College Sports Tonight.^[2]

College Sports Tonight was canceled in 2010, but other studio shows (including Inside College Football, Inside College Basketball, and NCAA March Madness Highlights) still originate from the Chelsea Piers location.

On February 15, 2011, it was announced that CBS College Sports Network would rebrand itself as CBS Sports Network, effective April 4, 2011. The move was made in order to better compete against other mainstream sports services,^[3][4] although its programming still consists of mostly college sports.

High Definition[link]

CBS Sports Network did not begin producing HD programming until August 2008. The two NCAA tourney games in 2008, which were in HD on CBS, were converted to a standard definition feed. The HD feed is letterboxed on the SD feed, similar to how CNN, HLN, Fox News Channel, and Fox Sports presents their programming.

Programming[link]

Since airing that first game, CBS Sports Network has televised thousands of hours of original programming, features, talk shows and documentaries as well as extensive women’s sports coverage. Its regular-season and championship event coverage draws from every major collegiate athletic conference and division, in addition to nine NCAA championships. CBS Sports Network televises 35 men’s and women’s college sports including football, basketball, baseball, Ultimate Frisbee, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, wrestling and volleyball from every major conference. The network holds multi-media and marketing rights for the Mountain West Conference, the Atlantic 10 Conference, Conference USA, the Big West Conference, the Patriot League, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Army football, and Navy athletics.

In April 2006, the network organized the first Collegiate Nationals, a festival of championships dedicated to crowning champions in a wide variety of collegiate action sports such as snowboarding, wakeboarding, and beach volleyball. More than 1,000 competitors converged on Reno-Tahoe to compete, the largest number ever for an event of its kind. For its second installment in 2007, the Collegiate Nationals added sports and other events such as national film and music competitions, as well as a second venue – San Diego. The third year, 2008, brought further changes, as the winter sports events were moved to the Keystone Resort near Boulder, Colorado and competitive eating was added.

In the fall of 2006, CSTV and Comcast launched the MountainWest Sports Network (colloquially known as The Mtn.), a network focusing exclusively on the Mountain West Conference. The relation with the network also gave CSTV exclusive online and broadcasting rights to Notre Dame's game at Air Force on November 11, 2006 — which caused controversy since CSTV did not have carriage as wide as the other networks which have aired Notre Dame games. The Irish have not visited a Mountain West team since.

On November 14, 2011, the National Lacrosse League announced that it had reached a two-year agreement with CBS Sports Network to televise eight regular-season and postseason games for the 2012 and 2013 seasons. The acquisition gives CBS Sports Network its first professional sports broadcast rights. ^[5]

The channel also has a number of talk shows in both the weekday and weekly format including:

Tackling the Trends - Wednesdays (2011 - present) Courtside with Seth Davis - Wednesdays (2010 - present) The Tim Brando Show (Radio Simulcast) - Weekdays (2011 - present) Rome - Weekdays (2012 - present)

Carriage[link]

CBS Sports Network is available on cable and satellite systems across the country, including DirecTV, Dish Network, Verizon FiOS, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Cablevision, Charter, Insight, Bright House Networks, Blue Ridge Communications, Mediacom, RCN, Advanced Cable, and Bresnan.

In Canada, Rogers Cable started carrying CBS Sports Network on October 9, 2008, while Bell TV started carrying the channel on September 3, 2009.

In late February 2009, CBS Sports Network reached a new carriage deal with DirecTV, which allowed the satellite provider to move the channel from its add on "Sports Pack" to its base package "Choice Xtra". The channel was moved to the lower level package on February 25, 2009. The new agreement gave the channel a distribution of 30 million viewers.^[6]

On July 7, 2009, it was announced that Cox Cable will add the channel in Orange County, California and Arizona on August 1, 2009.^[7]

On February 17, 2010, AT&T U-verse added the network.^[8]

On August 1, 2011, Cable One added the network in select markets.^[9]

Personalities[link]

• Adam Zucker, Tracy Wolfson, Dave Baker, Sam Ryan - Studio hosts
• Dave Ryan, Jason Knapp, Tom McCarthy, Matt Shepard - Play-by-play announcers
• Seth Davis, Pete Gillen, Greg Anthony, Wally Szczerbiak - Men's basketball analysts
• Aaron Taylor, Randy Cross, Phillip Fulmer, Akbar Gbaja-Biamila, Brian Jones, Tom Lemming, Jason Sehorn, Derrick Walker - Football analysts
• Rich Rodriguez was a college football analyst for much of the 2011 season before being hired as head coach at the University of Arizona.

Official athletic partnerships[link]

In addition to their own website, CBS Sports Network also operates athletics websites for many college athletics organizations.

Competitors[link]

• ESPN
• Fox Sports Net
• NBC Sports Network
• Big Ten Network
• MountainWest Sports Network
• Pac-12 Network
• Longhorn Network
• BYUtv

References[link]

This article is about the character from the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the resulting epithet. For the P. G. Wodehouse character, see Tom Travers.

A 1901 stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin containing mixed elements of Harriet Beecher Stowe's original Christian martyr and the stock minstrel character of later adaptations.

Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.^[1][2]

Original characterization and critical evaluations[link]

Detail of an illustration from the first book edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Depicts Uncle Tom as young and muscular

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery.^[3][4] Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.^[3]

The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward.^[3][4] An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints.^[5] Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.^[3] Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery".^[3] Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom:

Uncle Tom’s character is sketched with great power and rare religious perception. It triumphantly exemplifies the nature, tendency, and results of CHRISTIAN NON-RESISTANCE. We are curious to know whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of non-resistance for the White man, under all possible outrage and peril, as for the Black man… [For whites in parallel circumstances, it is often said] Talk not of overcoming evil with good—it is madness! Talk not of peacefully submitting to chains and stripes—it is base servility! Talk not of servants being obedient to their masters—let the blood of tyrants flow! How is this to be explained or reconciled? Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the Black man, and another of rebellion and conflict for the white man? When it is the whites who are trodden in the dust, does Christ justify them in taking up arms to vindicate their rights? And when it is the blacks who are thus treated, does Christ require them to be patient, harmless, long-suffering, and forgiving? Are there two Christs?^[6]

James Weldon Johnson, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, expresses an ambivalent opinion in his autobiography:

For my part, I was never an admirer of Uncle Tom, nor of his type of goodness; but I believe that there were lots of old Negroes as foolishly good as he; the proof of which is that they knowingly stayed and worked on the plantations that furnished sinews for the army which was fighting to keep them enslaved.”^[7]

In 1949 American writer James Baldwin rejected the emasculation of the title character "robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex" as the price of spiritual salvation for a dark-skinned man in a fiction whose African-American characters, in Baldwin's view, were invariably two dimensional stereotypes.^[3][8] To Baldwin, Stowe was closer to a pamphleteer than a novelist and her artistic vision was fatally marred by polemics and racism that manifested especially in her handling of the title character.^[8] Stowe had stated that her sons had wept when she first read them the scene of Uncle Tom's death, but after Baldwin's essay it ceased being respectable to accept the melodrama of the Uncle Tom story.^[3] Uncle Tom became what critic Linda Williams describes as "an epithet of servility" and the novel's reputation plummeted until feminist critics led by Jane Tompkins reassessed the tale's female characters.^[3] According to Debra J. Rosenthal in an introduction to a collection of critical appraisals for the Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, overall reactions have been mixed with some critics praising the novel for affirming the humanity of the African American characters and for the risks Stowe assumed in taking a very public stand against slavery before abolitionism had become a socially acceptable cause, and others criticizing the very limited terms upon which those characters' humanity was affirmed and the artistic shortcomings of political melodrama.^[9]

Inspiration[link]

A specific impetus for the novel was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which imposed heavy fines upon law enforcement personnel in Northern states if they refused to assist the return of people who escaped from slavery.^[4][10] The new law also stripped African Americans of the right to request a jury trial or to testify on their own behalf, even if they were legally free, whenever a single claimant presented a sworn affidavit of ownership.^[10] The same law authorized a $1000 fine and six months imprisonment for anyone who knowingly harbored or assisted a fugitive slave.^[10] These terms infuriated Stowe, so the novel was written, read, and debated as a political abolitionist tract.^[4]

Stowe drew inspiration for the Uncle Tom character from several sources. The best-known of these was Josiah Henson, whose autobiography was originally published in 1849 and later republished in extensively revised editions after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.^[11] Henson was enslaved at birth in 1789.^[11] He became a Christian at age eighteen and took up preaching.^[11] Henson attempted to purchase his freedom for $450, but after selling his personal assets to raise $350 and signing a promissory note for the remainder Henson's owner raised the price to $1000; Henson was unable to prove that the original agreement had been for a lesser amount.^[11] Shortly afterward Henson was ordered on a trip south to New Orleans, and when he learned that he was to be sold there he obtained a weapon and contemplated murdering his white companions, but decided against violence because his Christian morals forbade it.^[11] A sudden illness in one of his companions forced their return to Kentucky, and shortly afterward Henson escaped north with his family, settling in Canada where he became a civic leader.^[11]

Stowe read the first edition of Henson's narrative and later confirmed that she had incorporated elements from it into Uncle Tom's Cabin.^[11] Kentucky and New Orleans figure in both Henson's narrative and the novel's settings, and some other story elements are similar.^[11]

In the public imagination, however, Henson became synonymous with Uncle Tom.^[11] After Stowe's death her son and grandson claimed she and Henson had met before Uncle Tom's Cabin was written, but the chronology does not hold up to scrutiny and she probably drew material only from his published autobiography.^[11]

Epithet[link]

Uncle Tom, from an 1885 magic lantern series.

The term "Uncle Tom" is used as a derogatory epithet for an excessively subservient person, particularly when that person perceives their own lower-class status based on race. It is similarly used to negatively describe a person who betrays their own group by participating in its oppression, whether or not they do so willingly.^[12][13]

The popular negative connotation of "Uncle Tom" has largely been attributed to numerous derivative works inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin in the decade after its release, rather than the original novel itself, whose title character is a more positive figure.^[3] These works lampooned and distorted the portrayal of Uncle Tom with politically loaded overtones.^[5]

History[link]

American copyright law before 1856 did not give novel authors any control over derivative stage adaptations, so Stowe neither approved the adaptations nor profited from them.^[14] Minstrel show retellings in particular, usually performed by white men in blackface, tended to be derisive and pro-slavery, transforming Uncle Tom from Christian martyr to a fool or an apologist for slavery.^[5]

Adapted theatrical performances of the novel remained in continual production in the United States for at least eighty years.^[14] These representations had a lasting cultural impact and influenced the pejorative nature of the term Uncle Tom in later popular use.^[5]

Although not all minstrel depictions of Uncle Tom were negative, the dominant version developed into a stock character very different from Stowe's hero.^[5][15] Stowe's Uncle Tom was a muscular and virile man who refused to obey when ordered to beat other slaves; the stock character of minstrel shows became a shuffling asexual individual with a receding hairline and graying hair.^[15] To Jo-Ann Morgan, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture, these shifting representations undermined the subversive layers of Stowe's original characterization by redefining Uncle Tom until he fit within prevailing racist norms.^[14] Particularly after the Civil War, as the political thrust of the novel which had arguably helped to precipitate that war became obsolete to actual political discourse, popular depictions of the title character recast him within the apologetics of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.^[14] The virile father of the abolitionist serial and first book edition degenerated into a decrepit old man, and with that transformation the character lost the capacity for resistance that had originally given meaning to his choices.^[14][15] Stowe never meant Uncle Tom to be a derided name, but the term as a pejorative has developed based on how later versions of the character, stripped of his strength, were depicted on stage.^[16]

Claire Parfait, author of The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852-2002, opines that "the many alterations in retellings of the Uncle Tom story demonstrate an impulse to correct the retellers' perceptions of its flaws and "the capacity of the novel to irritate and rankle, even a century and a half after its first publication."^[4]

See also[link]

• Acting white
• House Negro
• Jump Jim Crow
• List of ethnic slurs
• Tom Shows
• Uncle Tom syndrome

References[link]

Notes[link]

• Osofsky, Gilbert, ed. (1969). Puttin' On Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-131432-2. 
• Mohammad Ali (2009). Thrilla in Manilla (Documentary). USA: HBO. 

External links[link]

• An article on the Uncle Tom caricature
• An article from EveryGirls 1931 by Olive Burns Kirby

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