Edda L. Fields-Black – författare

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants. 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. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent 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. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black 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. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida. 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.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman''s most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants. Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewLibrary Journal Starred ReviewBooklist Top Ten History Books of 2024Most 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. Yet the many biographies, children''s books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent 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. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina''s Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina''s Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman''s US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters'' families, Fields-Black 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. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida. 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.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman''s most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants. Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewLibrary Journal Starred ReviewBooklist Top Ten History Books of 2024Most 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. Yet the many biographies, children''s books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent 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. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina''s Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina''s Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman''s US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters'' families, Fields-Black 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. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida. 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.

WINNER - 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History WINNER - 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize WINNER - 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award WINNER - 2024 George C. Rogers Jr. Award WINNER - 2024 Marsha M. Greenlee History Award HONORABLE MENTION - 2025 James A. Rawley PrizeFINALIST - 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize FINALIST - 2025 ASALH Book Prize"The Best Nonfiction Books of 2024," Bloomberg.com "Also Recommended" among the Best Books of 2024, The New Yorker"Best Civil War Books of 2024," Civil War Monitor"Top 10 History Books: 2024," Booklist The definitive and prize-winning account of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.In the spring and summer of 1863, as the outcome of the Civil War, and with it the fate of the nation, hung in the balance, Union forces struggled to capture the offensive. Along the coastal waters of South Carolina, the Union Navy had taken the port cities of Port Royal and Beaufort, where war ships blasted their way into the harbor, driving residents inland in the "Great Beaufort Skedaddle." With a foothold on the coast, the Union then made plans to attack the expansive rice plantations lining the maze of rivers that fed into and out of the South's heartland, including the Combahee River. On the night of June 1, 1863, three federal gunboats steamed upriver from Beaufort and, starting early the next day, destroyed seven plantations along the Combahee, resulting in the liberation of more than 700 enslaved people. One of the most successful of the war, the raid was also, argues Edda Fields-Black in COMBEE, the largest slave rebellion in the continental United States. Those enslaved along the Combahee knew "Lincoln's gun-boats" were coming and seized their freedom when they saw the chance. The raid was remarkable in several other ways: it was carried out by one of the earliest all-Black regiments, the U.S. 2nd Second South Carolina Volunteers, and its gunboats were guided by Harriet Tubman. Fields-Black here offers the fullest account to date of this pivotal and dramatic event and the critical role that Tubman played in it. Drawing on meticulous and original research, she recreates the world of the rice plantations, and especially those in the "prison-house of bondage" who made them so profitable. She uses the archives to give these enslaved laborers names and stories, inscribing them permanently into the historical record. Among them is her third-great grandfather. The result is an American epic-rich, dense, layered, and pulsating with the life of those whose lives were changed by the Combahee River Raid, both in the short run and over the longer term. Destructive as it was, a humbling blow to the Confederacy's morale, the raid was also an act of creation, contributing to the formation of the community that thrives to this day in the Gullah Geechee Corridor. COMBEE will become and remain the authoritative work on the raid, all its historical actors, and its long aftermath.

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field of research attracting serious attention, but no attempt has yet been made to write a history of rice and its place in the rise of capitalism from a global and comparative perspective. Rice is a first step toward such a history. The fifteen chapters, written by specialists on Africa, the Americas, and Asia, are premised on the utility of a truly international approach to history. Each brings a new approach that unsettles prevailing narratives and suggests new connections. Together they cast new light on the significant roles of rice as crop, food, and commodity, and shape historical trajectories and interregional linkages in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia.