Harriet Tubman by Jean Humez

Harriet Tubman by Jean Humez

Harriet Tubman’s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children’s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. 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. Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. 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. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women’s club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of “race” throughout the twentieth century. 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. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.

"The definitive scholarly work" - Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University "Presented as a chronology of her life, these materials paint a far more vivid portrait than any biographer's account." - New York Times Book Review; "An excellent resource for students as well as for the general reader." - Black Issues Book Review; "An invaluable resource for understanding the real Harriet Tubman." - Library Journal"

Jean M. Humez is professor of women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and is the author of Gifts of Power, and Mother’s First-Born Daughters and coeditor of Gender, Race, and Class in the Media. She has written numerous articles on African American women’s spiritual autobiographies and on mediated autobiographical texts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780299191245
ISBN 10	0299191249
Title	Harriet Tubman
Author	Jean Humez
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Wisconsin Press
Year published	2005-12-30
Number of pages	488
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable