Fighting for Freedom: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Civil War
Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service was the least known part of her legendary life. Drawing on her groundbreaking research for her new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War, DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK will discuss how Tubman, the intelligence she gathered, and her ring of spies, scouts, and pilots played a central war in the Combahee River Raid, one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War and the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history. She contextualizes Tubman, her group of men, the US Colored Troops risking their freedom and their very lives so that others might be free is a small slice of the long history of Black freedom.
“Say Their Names:” Research Approaches to the History of Slavery and the African Diaspora
Reflecting on the groundbreaking work from her new book, COMBEE, and her decades of experience uncovering the voices of Africans and people of African descent. DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK shows how historians of slavery and genealogists can recover the names and stories of their enslaved ancestors in the Civil War Pension files. She discusses how finding her own ancestor (Hector Fields, #4th Regiment, Company C, USCT) led her to reconstruct the enslaved community that liberated themselves in the Combahee River Raid and enabled her to tell an intimate story of enslaved people’s lives and a triumphant story of them seizing their freedom. This research method coupled with newly digitized records could help millions of African American families find their enslaved ancestors.
Re-Imagining the Humanities, Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice
DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK’s work embodies “taking history off the shelf and putting it on stage.” It is an exemplar of how humanists remain relevant, can combat declining enrollments in humanities courses and of humanities majors. In this multi-media presentation, Fields-Black discusses her new kind of collaboration, a humanist (an historian) with world renowned visual and performing artists, to reimagine the past of Africans enslaved on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations by telling our ancestors’ story, an African and African-American story, through a classical music
Facing Climate Change: West African Rice Farmers and Lowcountry Rice Fields
From her decades of experience conducting research in West African and South Carolina/ Georgia historic rice fields, DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK sheds light on the West African skill and ingenuity used by enslaved Africans and their descendants, upsetting stereotypes about enslaved laborers acting solely as brute laborers by. And, she looks for lessons in the past to solve current and future challenges as both the West African rice farmers and the historic Lowcountry rice fields are threatened by sea level rise and climate.
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Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is award-winning historian, artist, and public humanities scholar whose specializes in technology and labor in West Africa and the US South. Her passion is uncovering voices that are not recorded in written sources and have not been previously heard and telling stories that heretofore have not been told.
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. The Combahee River Raid was based on intelligence gathered by Harriet Tubman who worked as a Union spy. It resulted in 756 enslaved people liberating themselves, the largest slave rebellion in US 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 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.
Fields-Black also translates her historical research into artistic platforms. She took “history off the shelf and put it on stage,” writing libretto for Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice (with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass), the first full symphonic work about slavery, and serving as executive producer for the project. Fields-Black also has worked as a consultant for permanent exhibits, “Rice Fields of South Carolina” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and “Carolina Gold” at the International African American Museum, and “From Slavery to Freedom” at the Senator John Heinz History Center.
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