Edda Fields-Black Discusses Pulitzer Prize-Winning Harriet Tubman Book March 26
Edda L. Fields-Black presents “Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” at 1 p.m. Thursday, March 26 in the auditorium of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. The book was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in history and the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. She will be in conversation with Robert Colby, assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. This session is co-sponsored by the UM Center for Civil War Research.
Read more about the book here.
Edda L. Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice, of peasant farmers in the precolonial Upper Guinea coast, and of enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and coeditor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time Emmy Award–winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Her most recent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.
Edda L. Fields-Black presents “Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” at 1 p.m. Thursday, March 26 in the auditorium of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. The book was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in history and the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. She will be in conversation with Robert Colby, assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. This session is co-sponsored by the UM Center for Civil War Research.
Read more about the book here.
Edda L. Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice, of peasant farmers in the precolonial Upper Guinea coast, and of enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and coeditor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time Emmy Award–winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Her most recent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.
Artwork by Charlie Buckley, Soybean Neon
