Harriet Tubman Library Guide: Biographies of Tubman

Historian Kate Clifford Larson gives Harriet Tubman the powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed life she deserves. Drawing from a trove of new documents and sources as well extensive genealogical research, Larson reveals Tubman as a complex woman— brilliant, shrewd, deeply religious, and passionate in her pursuit of freedom. The descendant of the vibrant, matrilineal Asanti people of the West African Gold Coast, Tubman was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland but refused to spend her life in bondage.

Written by an acclaimed historian, Catherine Clinton, this book covers how Harriet Tubman went on to be a scout, a spy, and a nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Clinton writes about how Tubman left her family in her early 20s to escape to Philadelphia. There she became the first and only woman, fugitive slave, and Black to work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. So successful was she in spiriting away slaves that the state of Maryland put a $40,000 bounty on her head. Within a year of starting her work, fellow slaves and Northerners began referring to Tubman as 'Moses' because of how many people she had freed.

This book tells the fascinating story of Tubman's life as an American icon. Analyzing how the Tubman icon has changed over time, Sernett shows that the various constructions of the "Black Moses" reveal as much about their creators as they do about Tubman herself. Three biographies of Harriet Tubman were published within months of each other in 2003-04; they were the first book-length studies of the "Queen of the Underground Railroad" to appear in almost sixty years. Sernett examines the accuracy and reception of these three books as well as two earlier biographies first published in 1869 and 1943. Ultimately, Sernett contends that Harriet Tubman may be America's most malleable and resilient icon.

Combining biography with the larger history of slavery, the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, the increasing sectionalism of the pre-Civil War era, as well as the war and post-war Reconstruction, Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom uses a variety of documents to trace the legendary life of Harriet Tubman.

Jean M. Humez’s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive 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. Humez shows how Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Tubman vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war, she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged.

This book offers readers an intimate look at Tubman’s early life firsthand: her birth as Araminta Ross in 1822 in Dorchester, MD, the harsh treatment she experienced growing up—including being struck with a two-pound iron when she was twelve years old; and her triumphant escape from slavery as a young woman and rebirth as Harriet Tubman. We travel with Tubman along the treacherous route of the Underground Railroad and hear of her friendships with Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and other abolitionists. We accompany her to the battlefields of the Civil War, where she worked as a nurse and a cook and earned the name General Tubman, join her on slave-freeing raids in the heart of the Confederacy, and share her horror and sorrow as she witnesses the massacre of Colonel Shaw and the black soldiers of the 54th Regiment at Fort Wagner.

Escaped slave, Civil War spy, scout, and nurse, and champion of women's suffrage, Harriet Tubman is an icon of heroism. Perhaps most famous for leading enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, Tubman was dubbed "Moses" by followers. But abolition and the close of the Civil War were far from the end of her remarkable career. Tubman continued to fight for black civil rights, and campaign fiercely for women¿s suffrage, throughout her life. In this vivid, concise narrative supplemented by primary documents, Kristen T. Oertel introduces readers to Tubman¿s extraordinary life, from the trauma of her childhood slavery to her civil rights activism in the late nineteenth century, and in the process reveals a nation¿s struggle over its most central injustices.