Edda Fields-Black
Award-winning Author & Historian
Pulitzer Prize for History
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Re-Imagining the Humanities, Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice
- Say Their Names: Research Approaches to the History of Slavery & the African Diaspora
-
The Making of COMBEE
-
Crafting the Personal Archive: Historical Research For Creative Nonfiction
-
The Historian Artist: Writing Rice Fields/Building Historical Narratives
-
Research as Genesis: Character Writing For Historians
-
The Personal is Historical: Writing Your Universal History
-
Stories of Enslaved People and their Pursuits of Freedom
-
Actually, Secretary Hegseth Harriet Tubman Was a War Hero
-
The Art of Research: Multidisciplinary Methodologies in the Age of AI
- An Evening with Edda Fields-Black
Biography
“At times, Fields-Black’s prose reads as fiction, complete with the sense of character and Fields-Black’s gift of dramatization, of setting the scene. Fields-Black’s painstaking research…is driven by a need to recover and restore the missing voices that sing freedom through generations of both heroism and suffering. A stunning artifact in and of itself.” —Southern Literary Review
“Edda Fields-Black takes a legendary event and an iconic figure and with pathbreaking research and elegant prose gives us a striking, living, and breathing history of Black courage and freedom dreams at the dawn of emancipation.” —Imani Perry
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is an award-winning historian, artist, and public humanities scholar who specializes in technology and labor in West Africa and the US South. She is author of the books Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2014), and COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024), which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Fields-Black’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, is the first detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War, a raid the US Army conducted on seven rice plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry in June 1863. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who fought in the Raid, as well as Blacks enslaved on the Combahee area who were not liberated in the Raid. She reflected, “As a child, we visited my extended paternal family, great-grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, every summer in Green Pond, Whitehall, and Over Swamp, South Carolina with my parents and paternal grandparents. Though I had been curious since an early age about my grandparents’ ‘peculiar’ speech patterns, my mother’s historical and genealogical research about my father’s family in preparation for and during family summer vacations was my first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its own peculiar history.” COMBEE is based on original documents in which freedom seekers who liberated themselves in the Raid tell their life stories in their own words.
Fields-Black is also co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass. Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Museum of American History, 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.
Visit Author WebsiteVideos
Publications
COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
Nonfiction, 2024
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–Charleston, Beaufort, Savannah, and Jacksonville–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.
Rice: Global Networks and New Histories
Anthology, 2017
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 several regions of Asia, are premised on the utility of a truly international approach to history. Each one 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.
Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora
Nonfiction, 2014
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.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• OpEd: Actually, Secretary Hegseth, Harriet Tubman was a war hero – Washington Post
• 13 Books on American History That Mapped Out Beverly Gage’s Travelogue – Publishers Weekly
• COMBEE Review: Harriet Tubman, Fighting for Freedom – WSJ
• 4 The Record speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and CMU professor Dr. Edda Fields-Black – ABC
• Miami historian Edda L. Fields-Black wins Pulitzer Prize for book on Harriet Tubman – Miami Times
• The Most Anticipated Audiobooks of August – Literary Hub
• Pulitzer Prize-winning book inspires art museum exhibit honoring Harriet Tubman – ABC News
Listen to Audio
• The Untold Stories of the Combahee River Raid Episode with Dr. Edda Fields-Black – The Broad Cast
• Edda Fields-Black: The Harriet Tubman you didn’t know – Clear & Vivid Podcast
Selected Writings
• Read “Black Families Can Now Recover More of Their Lost Histories” – New York Times
In this excerpt from the groundbreaking, COMBEE, Edda Fields-Black tells the dramatic story of how Harriet Tubman led the 150 African American soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers to rescue more than 700 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation. (Originally published with Medium.)
While Confederate pickets were stationed in the southeast part of the lower Combahee River at Field’s Point and in the northwest portion at Combahee Ferry, the Third Military District’s main forces were stationed in the northeast point of the triangle at Green Pond, with a smaller contingent at Chisolmville. Yet the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers’ gunboats were unopposed as they penetrated a roughly twenty-mile stretch of the Combahee, virtually under the Confederates’ noses. The Confederate pickets were seemingly paralyzed by their commanders’ indecision.
Meanwhile, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers continued their work. Amid billowing columns of smoke, hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people ran for their lives. Tubman remembered, years after the Civil War ended, that when “Lincoln’s gunboats come to set them free,” displaying their flags and blowing what the New South and Frederick Douglass’s Douglass’ Monthly described as the “uninterrupted pipe of the steam whistle,” that somewhere around eight hundred freedom seekers ran for their lives and boarded the vessels. It was as if there was a “mysterious telegraphic communication existing among these simple people,” Tubman told Sarah Bradford, bringing people not just from Joshua Nicholls’s plantation, where the Harriet A. Weed landed, but from James L. Paul’s plantation in the southeast direction and plantations as far away as Combahee Ferry, several miles to the northwest.¹
Amid billowing columns of smoke, hundreds if not thousands of enslaved people ran for their lives.
Minus and Hagar Hamilton were among those who fled down to the Harriet A. Weed. Most freedom seekers toted their worldly possessions in large bundles on their heads. Captain Apthorp wrote in his journal that many of their bundles were so large they “completely overshadowed” the freedom seekers themselves.
Ole woman and I go down to de boat; dem dey say behind us, “Rebels comin’! Rebels comin’!” I hab notin’ on but my shirt and pantaloons; ole woman one single frock he hab on, and one handkerchief on he head; I leff all- two my blanket and run for de Rebel come, den dey did n’t come, did n’t truss for come.
The elderly couple left the rice fields with the clothes they had on their backs. Minus wore only his shirt and pantaloons; Hagar, the “old … woman” (whom Minus Hamilton referred to with the masculine pronoun “he,” which is a morphological feature of the Gullah dialect), wore a one-piece shift and a head-tie covering her hair. Hamilton may have regretted leaving his only possessions — two blankets — behind in the slave quarters when he ran before the Rebels came. But he did not regret escaping the land of bondage.²
The Hamiltons almost did not make it onto the Harriet A. Weed, because they were among the oldest of the Old Heads on the lower Combahee could not run to the boat like the Prime Hands, Boys and Wives, or Pikins. When Minus and Hagar Hamilton got down to the steamboat, freedom seekers running behind them told the couple that the Confederates were in pursuit. Hamilton remembered Hagar retorting that the Confederates could bring it on if they wanted to; let them challenge the Yankee gunboat head-on. Surprisingly, the Confederates did not challenge Lincoln’s gunboats or the “presumptious” Black soldiers. Hamilton surmised that this was because they did not think they could win the fight.
Ise eighty- eight year old, mas’r. My ole Mas’r Lowndes keep all de ages in a big book, and when we come to age ob sense we mark em down ebry year, so I know. Too ole for come? Mas’r joking. Neber too ole for leave de land of bondage. I old, but great good for chil’en, gib thousand tank ebry day. Young people can go through, force . . . , mas’r but de ole folk mus’ go slow.
Colonel Higginson had asked Minus Hamilton if he had thought he was too old to run to the US Army gunboats. It was an odd question for a determined abolitionist to ask; perhaps he simply wanted to draw the story out of the old man. Hamilton was grateful for the young people; he said a thousand thank-you’s every day. He was grateful for the young Black people who were ready to fight for their freedom, because young people could go forcefully. The old people, like him and Hagar, had to go slowly.³
Get Oxford Academic’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Remember me for faster sign in
Joshua Nicholls later wrote in his letter to the editor that he assumed that the freedom seekers had recognized among the Black soldiers a number of formerly enslaved men who had already liberated themselves. Though Nicholls was likely too far away in the forest to positively identify the soldiers’ faces or voices, he was correct. Friday Barrington was a member of Company D, which came ashore at Colonel Heyward’s Cypress Plantation, which, as we have seen, was where he, his parents, and his sister were held in bondage. Barrington may not have been the only Combahee freedom seeker to return during the raid.⁴
The Library of Congress from Washington, DC, United States, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
At any rate, while Nicholls ran off to the woods, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers came ashore from his boat landing and onto his plantation. From his hiding place he saw them come up to his country estate and set it ablaze. Nicholls also saw smoke rising from the direction of his stepson’s property next door and knew the soldiers had torched Rose Hill Plantation. The soldiers moved swiftly, their movements on different plantations seeming almost synchronized. Before Nicholls knew it, thick billows of smoke rose simultaneously from the north and west, coming from the steam-powered rice mill, overseer’s house, and stables at Oakland and Cypress Plantations.⁵
What Nicholls described was a chaotic scene of destruction and mayhem: The “roaring of flames” and “towering column of smoke from every quarter” as fire engulfed his and his neighbors’ property. The “barbarous howls of the negroes” as they reunited family members, retrieved belongings, and decided what they would do next. The “blowing of horns, the harsh steam whistle” signaling the enslaved population to hurry to the river and steal their freedom. Nicholls witnessed Blacks “carrying bags of rice upon their heads” from his own barn and running toward the steamboat. He thought the raid a “repetition of San Domingo,” when free people of color and Africans held in bondage on sugar plantations in Saint-Domingue (what is now Haiti) overthrew the planters and the colonial government, abolished enslavement, and created the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.⁶
Tears of joy ran down their faces as they scrambled to touch freedom with their own hands, clinging to the soldiers and officers’ hands, knees, clothing, weapons — anything they could grasp.
When the freedom seekers rushed to the safety of the Harriet Weed, they stopped to greet the soldiers before climbing aboard. They overwhelmed Captain Apthorp. He remembered them saying, “Lord bless you Massa,” “Good Morning massa Oh bless the good Lord,” and other utterances, all expressed with intense earnestness. Tears of joy ran down their faces as they scrambled to touch freedom with their own hands, clinging to the soldiers and officers’ hands, knees, clothing, weapons — anything they could grasp. Apthorp was touched by their inability to find words to express their relief, joy, and gratitude. Nicholls, on the other hand, was horrified. He wrote that the people he formerly had held in bondage “seemed utterly transformed, drunk with excitement, and capable of the wildest excesses.”⁷
[1] “The Expedition up the Combahee,” New South, Jun. 6, 1863; “A Raid Among the Rice Plantations”; “Miscellaneous Items,” Douglass’ Monthly, Aug. 1863; Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 40; Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 6; Bradford, Harriet Tubman, 100; Ewen, Days of the Steamboats, 9–10.
[2] Apthorp, “Montgomery’s Raids in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina,” 17; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 238; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed. Christopher Looby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 147; Salikoko Mufwene, “Gullah Morphology and Syntax,” in Handbook of Varieties of English, ed. Walt Wolfram, Bernd Kortmann, and Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 363; Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, 227–229.
[3] Looby, The Complete Civil War Journal, 167; Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment, 238–239.
[4] “The Raid on Combahee,” The Mercury, June 19, 1863.
[5] “The Raid on Combahee”; “From South Carolina”; “A Raid among the Rice Plantations”; “Miscellaneous Items”; Frederic Denison, Shot and Shell: The Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Regiment in the Rebellion, 1861–1865 (Providence: The Third R. I. H. Vet. Art. Association, 1879), 155–157; Davis, History of the 104th Pennsylvania Regiment, from August 22nd, 1861, to September 30th, 1864, 209–210.
[6] “The Enemy’s Raid on the Banks of the Combahee,” The Mercury, Jun. 4, 1864; “The Raid on Combahee”; “Miscellaneous Items.”
[7] “The Raid on Combahee”; “From South Carolina”; Apthorp, “Montgomery’s Raids in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina,” 16– 17; “Jeff W. Grigg, The Combahee River Raid: Harriet Tubman & Lowcountry Liberation (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 74; Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 23.
