Please join us on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, for an engaging conversation with author Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black on her latest book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. 

Fields-Black—herself a descendant of one of the participants in the raid—shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. She brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity—perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid. 

Edda L. Fields-Black is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author, specializing in the transnational history of West African rice farmers and their connections to enslaved laborers on American rice plantations. She is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. Her work includes the book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History. She is also known for Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and her work on Gullah culture.

Register HERE.