Edda Fields-Black
Congratulations to Edda Fields-Black, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for history with her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
Read Geri Lipshultz’s excellent review of this work.
The Gibbes Museum of Art, a beacon for the arts in the American South since its establishment in 1858, announces the world premiere of Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid (May 23 ? October 5).
Now more than ever, this previously untold story is an important milestone in our country’s history that should never be erased. The efforts to remove Harriet Tubman’s name from a U.S. Navy ship, and to remove Tubman from the National Park Service website, make this a timely and even more powerful exhibition.
This new museum show brings to life the daring freedom fighters, led by Harriet Tubman on that fateful moonlit night in 1863, when 756 enslaved people liberated themselves in six hours ? more than ten times the number of enslaved people Tubman rescued during the Underground Railroad. This was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the U.S., yet until now it has been mostly overlooked.
On Veterans Day, November 11, 2024, Tubman was posthumously commissioned as a Brigadier General by the Maryland National Guard.
She was the first woman in the U.S. to lead an armed military operation during a war, yet she was never given official status by the military, and fought for decades for her military pension. Now, more than a century after her death and 160 years after her military service, Harriet Tubman was named a general.
Museum hours and visitor info at: www.gibbesmuseum.org/visit
Leave a Reply