Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom by Lois Horton

At its root, the Underground Railroad was both a migration story and a resistance movement. These networks ebbed and flowed over time and space. While some participation was serendipitous and fleeting, the Underground Railroad operated through local and regional networks built on trusted circles of extended families and faith communities. Together with their allies-white, Black, and Native American-they represented a grassroots resistance movement in which people united across racial, gender, religious, and class lines in hopes of promoting social change. Fugitives exhibited creativity, determination, courage, and fortitude in their bids for freedom. Allies assisted in journeys to freedom, but the Underground Railroad is centered around the enslaved people who resisted their status and asserted their humanity. While many date the Underground Railroad as starting in the 1830s, when railroad terminology became common, enslaved people began escaping from the earliest colonial period. One of the most consequential methods was self-liberation.

A chronology of Tubman's life, along with questions for consideration and a selected bibliography, enhance this important volume.Africans and their descendants enslaved in the western hemisphere resisted their status in several ways.

A rich collection of accompanying documents including the Fugitive Slave Acts, letters, newspaper articles, advertisements and tributes to Tubman shed light on Tubman's relationships with key abolitionist figures such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison her role in the women's rights movement and her efforts on behalf of fugitive slaves and freed blacks through the Civil War and beyond. Going beyond mere biography, Horton weaves through Tubman's story the larger history of slavery, the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, the increasing sectionalism of the pre-Civil War era, as well as the war and post-war Reconstruction.

In the introduction to this compelling volume, Lois Horton reveals the woman behind the legend and addresses the ways in which Tubman's mythic status emerged in her own lifetime and beyond. Harriet Tubman is a legendary figure in the history of American slavery and the Underground Railroad.

Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom by Lois Horton