A book on Harriet Tubman’s work couldn’t have come at a more crucial time | Opinion

In the spring of last year, I traveled down to Green Pond, S.C., where I grew up, to hear a historian talk about her new book.

I don’t usually make three-hour drives for history lectures, but the author, Edda Fields-Black, is a cousin, and her book, “Combee,” is well worth anyone’s time. It uses Civil War pension records to shed light on Harriet Tubman’s exploits as a Union Army scout in the S.C. Lowcountry, helping bring freedom to the rice plantations in the Green Pond region.

The publication of the book was a proud moment for Edda, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But it was also a proud moment for Green Pond, our tiny enclave tucked among the pines off U.S. Highway 17, the coastal road connecting Charleston and Savannah. Many cousins packed the pews of the local church where she spoke last spring, and she signed book after book afterward. “For freedom!” she wrote.

Recently, we all cheered even louder when her brilliant, well-deserving book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history.

The honor felt especially poignant to me, not simply because I knew Edda, but also because the Pulitzer board honored Black history scholarship at a time when many schools are shying away from it, unsure which aspects are “safe” and which might get branded with the scarlet letters D-E-I.

“Historians like myself, we’re used to working in the background with little recognition,” she told me recently. “We haven’t been used to working in the bullseye. In my career, I can say that’s new. But it also helps us to understand just how important our work is.”

Juneteenth may be a federal holiday now, but Black history’s place in America’s canon feels more fragile than ever. There is real peril in this. When we retreat from reasoned, evidence-based scholarship on important subjects like science or history, the online fever swamps fill the void. You get everything from subtle half-truths to shameless misinformation to the kind of crazy-babble you’d hear only from barbershop cranks or drunk uncles in saner times. Amazingly, a young African American Tik Toker recently went viral with a post insisting that Harriet Tubman was not a real person.

Despite such foolishness, Edda sees glimmers of hope. Her book, for instance, won not only the Pulitzer, but also two prizes awarded by Civil War historians: the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. It won even though Edda isn’t a Civil War historian, and her book is less about war tactics than it is about Tubman and the African American fight for freedom.

The Civil War historians understood that in telling a less-known story of Black people’s lives during the war, “Combee” isn’t revising history. It’s filling in the blank spaces of an incomplete history.

“You can say Civil War historians are typically a stodgy bunch, but they got it,” Edda said. “In this year, of all years, when Confederate generals’ names are being put back on monuments and ships and bases . . . You have people and organizations standing up and saying ‘No, we’re going to tell the whole story.’”

Take a break from scrolling. Pick up “Combee” — or any other good book about history, for that matter. If the ideas in it challenge you, good.

Life, and history, are full of uncomfortable, untidy moments. Those are the ones that teach us the most about ourselves, and each other.

This story was originally published June 22, 2025 at 7:00 AM with the headline "A book on Harriet Tubman’s work couldn’t have come at a more crucial time | Opinion."