Carnegie Mellon University Professor Edda L. Fields-Black on has won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.”
Fields-Black is a professor of history and director of The Humanities Center at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Pulitzer judges named two books as winners in the History category this year. The other winner is “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America” by Kathleen DuVal, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Combee” was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. The publisher describes the book as “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.”
The Combahee River Raid was an operation in the Civil War. “On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black U.S. 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,” the text from the publisher reads, noting that Fields-Black’s book focuses on an aspect of Tubman’s life that doesn’t get much attention: “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.”
The Combahee River Raid was meant “to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.”
Fields-Black has made her academic career at CMU, joining the university in 2001 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She became a full professor in the Department of History in 2024, assuming the leadership of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at the same time.
Check out COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War here: https://amzn.to/4iMX30Y
