New Book and New Take on Harriet Tubman

Author Recasts Civil War as Slave Rebellion

Harriet Tubman is an iconic figure in the history of the United States, as illustrated by the length and detail of her entry on Wikipedia. She is best known for her Underground Railroad rescues of enslaved people before the Civil War. But Edda L. Fields-Black, in her new book Combee, being released this month, argues that the Combahee River Raid that Tubman co-led in 1863 was both a decisive battle of the Civil War and “the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history."

Fields-Black, herself a descendant of one of the rebels in the raid, bases her book on extensive documentation from accounts by Black Union army veterans, available at the National Archives, as well as a host of other sources. 

Read more about the book in the review by Eric Herschthal in The New Republic, which begins like this:

On June 2, 1863, not long after midnight, 300 recently escaped slaves, all armed and with at least one woman among them, invaded a stretch of rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. When the armed Black rebels arrived, the slaveholders fled, but their enslaved workers refused to follow them. Instead, at least 727 of them followed the rebels to nearby boats, which ushered them to a military camp, declared them free, and armed those able to fight. Meanwhile, as dawn approached, the retreating Black rebels set fire to the abandoned slave labor camps, depriving the slaveholders’ army of a vital source of food, and delivering a major victory in the Black rebels’ larger war on slavery.

[Continue reading the review.]

For another review of the book, see https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/combee-edda-l-fields-black-book-review/

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Announcement and Poll

Readers of AfricaFocus Bulletin in previous years will know that I have often offered references to books in that format. So far in AfricaFocus Notes, in the new Substack format, I have rarely focused on books.

The two posts in which I have done so were

• Reading Africa and World History: From Central Gondwana to Global Apartheid, in October 2023, and

• World Music is African Music: Just Listen to the Songs, in March 2023, with a brief reference to a book on the origin of human speech.

Since the launch in 2020 of the non-profit Bookshop.org (a corporation certified by the B-Lab as meeting defined social responsibility standards), I have set up affiliate bookshops including https://bookshop.org/shop/africafocus, https://bookshop.org/shop/mysteryplaces.org, and https://bookshop.org/shop/mount-pleasant-dc.

Bookshop.org donates the surplus from its operations to independent bookstores around the country, now adding up to more than $30 million. Affiliate shops, which get a small fee for books sold through their affiliate portal, can be set up by authors, bookstores, publishers, non-governmental organizations, or individual readers interested in referring books to their friends.

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Your feedback

I am considering setting up an additional separate Substack blog that would focus only on books, such as this post on a single book, others featuring curated lists of books such as in my Bookshop.org pages, or just reflections on reading and libraries, whether physical or digital.

I would definitely enjoy doing this, but I would like your feedback before I begin. So I am trying out the Substack poll feature to see how well it works.