Don’t miss hearing about the remarkable book COMBEE, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History, and gain new insight this first-of-its-kind conflict and the central role played by Harriet Tubman.

Join us the week before the Juneteenth to hear from Edda L. Fields-Black about COMBEE, the first detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War: the June 1863 Combahee River Raid in South Carolina. There, Harriet Tubman and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued and emancipated more than 700 slaves. Dr. Fields-Black’s account is based on original documentation and written by a descendant of the enslaved men and women who fought in the raid; and, in the process, liberated themselves. COMBEE was drawn from more than 175 never-before-used US Civil War pension files of the regiments of Second South Carolina Volunteers, including Tubman's. Learn more about Dr. Fields-Black’s research and writing process through her illustrated presentation and discussion with Dr. Kendra T. Field, Chief Historian of 10 Million Names.

Edda L. Fields-Black teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and has written extensively about the history of West African rice farmers, including in such works as Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Fields-Black has served as a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture's permanent exhibit, "Rice Fields of the Lowcountry." She is the executive producer and librettist of "Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice," a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass. Fields-Black is a descendent of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina; her great-great-great grandfather fought in the Combahee River Raid in June 1863. Her determination to illuminate the riches of the Gullah dialect, and to reclaim Gullah Geechee history and culture, has taken her to the rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia to those of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa.

Kendra Taira Field is the Gerald R. Gill Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University.  A citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country, which traced her own ancestors’ post-emancipation lives in Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Field previously abridged David Levering Lewis' Pulitzer Prize winning biography of W.E.B. Du Bois.  As a public historian, Field co-founded and directs the Du Bois Forum and serves as Chief Historian for the 10 Million Names project. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition of the National Women's History Museum. She has participated in numerous documentaries from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” to HBO Max’s Breaking New Ground; and co-produced Night Fight, which premiered at South by Southwest. Field received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from NYU, MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and B.A. from Williams College. Her forthcoming book, The Stories We Tell is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present.

Presented in partnership with 10 Million Names and the Museum of African American History