Product Description

Celebrated for her courageous exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harpers Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet. Now, in a biography widely praised for its impeccable research and its compelling narrative, Harriet Tubman is revealed for the first time as a singular and complex character, a woman who defied simple categorization.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187297 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-05
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.25" h x .75" w x 5.50" l, .62 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Clinton has an extraordinary knack of compressing complex history into an informing brief paragraph or a single sentence, making this "first full-scale biography" of Tubman (18251913) a revelation. To the task of illuminating the "difficult to document" life of the woman known as "Moses," Clinton brings her deep immersion in Southern history, women's history and African-American history. Succinctly, she sets the stage upon which Tubman moves, offering just enough biographical detail to give less well-known figures vitality (Mary Shadd Cary gets more space than Frederick Douglass; Union general David Hunter more than William Lloyd Garrison) and just enough historical detail to render Tubman's milieu meaningful (unfamiliar Canadian history gets more space than the familiar Fugitive Slave Acts). Although she often posed as an old woman, Tubman was in her 20s when she began her rescues, and in her mid-30s as the Civil War broke out. Clinton is meticulous (without being annoying) in distinguishing the speculative from the known in Tubman's private life. Of far greater consequence is Clinton's revelation of Tubman's public (though usually clandestine) work. In distinguishing between "runaways" and "fugitives," between "conductors" and "abductors... those who ventured into the South to extract slaves" ("all of them white men" before Tubman), in detailing the extent to which she "never wavered in her support" of John Brown, in chronicling her role in the Combahee River raid, Clinton turns sobriquets into meaningful descriptors of a unique person. In her hands, a familiar legend acquires human dimension with no diminution of its majesty and power.
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From Booklist
Clinton, who has taught history at Harvard and has written 15 books, presents a full portrait of a complicated woman with deep religious convictions, incredible courage, and a passion for freedom. Tubman suffered from seizures and narcolepsy because of a head injury sustained when she tried to help an escaping slave. Her condition might have contributed to the constant visions she reported of fleeing harrowing circumstances and of danger signs that she often heeded to her benefit. Clinton recalls Tubman's vital role in the Underground Railroad; her relationship with other prominent antislavery activists of the time, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Sojourner Truth; her espionage and other services provided to the Union during the Civil War; and her later involvement in women's rights issues. Also covered are Tubman's early marriage, her many rescues of enslaved family members, the mysterious abduction of a fair-skinned girl who may have been her own daughter, and her later marriage to a man nearly 20 years her junior. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Catherine Clinton was born in Seattle on April 5, 1952. She was raised in Kansas City, Missouri from the age of two and attended the Sunset Hill School for Girls (now Pembroke Hill School), graduating in 1969. She graduated from Harvard University (Lowell House) with a joint degree in Sociology and Afro-American Studies in 1973. Her senior honors thesis was on the role of the plantation mistress in the Old South. She won the Isobel Briggs Traveling Fellowship from Radcliffe College and went to England. She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Sussex in 1974, completing her thesis on Fanny Kemble. After a detour as an instructor at the University of Benghazi in the Libyan Arab Republic, she returned to the United States to attend Princeton University. She entered the Ph.D. program in history at Princeton University in 1975 and left to take a job at Union College in 1979. She received her doctorate in history from Princeton in 1980, completing her dissertation on the role of the plantation mistress from 1780-1835 under the direction of James M. McPherson. In 1982 she married New York City architect Daniel Lee Colbert. In 1983 she left Union College to take a job in the history department at Harvard University, the same year that she published her first book: The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. She and her husband moved to Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1984 her first child, Drew Colbert was born in Boston. The same year her second book, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, appeared. In 1988 she left the history department at Harvard to teach in the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University. During this period, she became interested in children's education and became a consultant and writer for secondary school social studies texts. In 1989 her second son, Ned Colbert, was born in Boston. In 1990 she returned Harvard to teach in the Department of Afro-American Studies. She and her family moved to Greenwich, Ct. in 1991. In the fall of 1993, she left Harvard to teach African-American literature in the Department of English at Brown University, where she taught for one semester. In 1994 she decided to concentrate on writing full time to give her the flexibility to spend more time with her young children. She has written, edited, co-authored or co-edited over a dozen books to date. In 1993 she became interested in screenwriting and sold several historical projects for television, although none, to date, have been produced. She has written for the History Channel, consulted on projects for WGBH, and is a member of the Screen Writer's Guild. She also became involved in writing children's books, and has concentrated on non-fiction books for kids. In the fall of 1997 she held the Douglas Southall Freeman Visiting Chair of History at the University of Richmond, and then in the fall of 1998 was the Lewis Jones Visiting Chair of History at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. From the fall of 1999 until May 2001 she held the Weissman Visiting Chair of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. For the academic year 2001-2002 she held the Mark Clark Chair of History at the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2003-2004, she will be a visiting professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Ct. She continues to be an affiliate of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. Her newest children's book, A Poem of Her Own, has been published by Harry Abrams in 2003. She has recently completed a biographical study of Harriet Tubman.