Harriet Tubman

Escaped slave, Civil War spy, scout, and nurse, and champion of women’s suffrage, Harriet Tubman is an icon of heroism. Perhaps most famous for leading enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad, Tubman was dubbed “Moses” by followers. But abolition and the close of the Civil War were far from the end of her remarkable career. Tubman continued to fight for black civil rights, and campaign fiercely for women’s suffrage, throughout her life.

In this vivid, concise narrative supplemented by primary documents, Kristen T. Oertel introduces readers to Tubman’s extraordinary life, from the trauma of her childhood slavery to her civil rights activism in the late nineteenth century, and in the process reveals a nation’s struggle over its most central injustices.

Author Biography

Kristen T. Oertel is the Mary Frances Barnard Associate Professor of nineteenth-century American history at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas, and co-author with Marilyn Blackwell of Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood.