Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Catherine Clinton has written a good modern biography of Harriet Tubman, so well known for her leadership role in the Underground Railroad. Tubman's life was written about a number of times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in many works for children and young people, but no scholarly biographies. "Clinton's expertise in writing Civil War history is readily evident in discussions of Tubman's role as a scout, spy, and indispensable leader in the June 1863 Combahee River (South Carolina) Raid that resulted in the liberation of hundreds of women, men, and children. Many of the able-bodied men among them joined the U.S. Colored Troops." -- Wilma King, Journal of Southern History.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow enslaved people to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. In Bound for the Promised Land historian Kate Clifford Larson gives us a powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed portrait of Tubman and her times. Drawing from a trove of new documents and sources as well as extensive genealogical data, Larson presents Harriet Tubman as a complete human being—brilliant, shrewd, deeply religious, and passionate in her pursuit of freedom.

Jean M. Humez s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life - a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women. Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman s work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford.