Carnegie Mellon University historian, author, and librettist Edda Fields-Black, professor and director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center, began working on a book about famous Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman’s involvement in the Combahee River Raid — the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history — in 2016.
The project, which explored Tubman’s Civil War service as a spy for the U.S. Army, involved extensive research. Fields-Black poured over testimony recorded in the US Civil War Pension Files. She worked with scientists mapping the region and researchers who were experts on the Civil War. She even spent hours in historic rice fields in South Carolina, walking the same routes that former slaves seeking freedom during the operation would have taken.
Then, in the middle of her research, the pandemic stopped the world. Suddenly, research trips were no longer possible — libraries and archives were closed for months at a time, and CMU implemented travel bans to keep the community safe.
Fields-Black turned to the University Libraries to help her maintain access to essential resources during this time. The Libraries’ skilled faculty were able to connect her with creative ways to obtain the information she needed to continue her work.
Goal
- Find avenues to explore primary sources and archival repositories focusing on the Combahee River Raid, despite the global pandemic and resulting shutdown.
How We Helped
- Senior Librarian Emerita Sue Collins, who liaised with the Department of History during the first years of the project, ordered the books Fields-Black needed for research and shipped them directly to her home so she could continue her work remotely.
- Arts and Humanities Librarians Charlotte Kiger Price and Ashley Werlinich helped Fields-Black locate digitally-available primary sources, including newspapers from the 19th century and the Congressional Record, which is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. They used these resources to look for mentions of certain people or events and details of troop movements.
- The Congressional Record allowed them to trace the congressional pay for Tubman’s work as a scout and spy, along with another African American scout, Walter Plowden. They found that while Plowden was paid for his work, Tubman was not.
Results
- “COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War” was published in February of 2024.
- This spring, Fields-Black received the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which is awarded annually for exceptional scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era.
- Fields-Black’s book was also selected as a 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner in history. The prize, shared this year with “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” by Kathleen DuVal, is annually awarded to a “distinguished and appropriately documented book on the history of the United States.”
