Harriet Tubman — The Life and the Life Stories

A scholarly two-part volume. The first half is a biography of Tubman — born into slavery in Maryland around 1820, escaped north in 1849, returned repeatedly through the 1850s to bring out her family and others, served the Union Army as a scout and spy, and settled at Auburn, New York, where she supported an extended household and eventually founded a home for the aged. The second half is the more unusual part: an annotated collection of the primary documents in which her story was told, from the accounts her white antislavery associates published in the 1850s-1870s through the suffragist and Black women’s club recoveries of her in the early twentieth century.

The book’s argument is about transmission — that almost everything known about Tubman reaches us through someone else’s writing, shaped by what that writer needed her to represent — which makes it a study in how a national figure gets made as well as a life.

Context: Filed on the list under Nonfiction. Its row in the source is badly mangled (see the notes above the heading), and the book that the curator’s description actually names is this one.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Jean M. Humez — the author, a scholar of nineteenth-century American women’s autobiographical writing.
• Abraham Lincoln — the wartime administration whose army Tubman scouted for.
• Memory — how a life survives when its subject left no writing of her own.
• Storytelling — the second half of the book is literally a dossier of competing versions.
• History — and the question of what counts as a source.