Event Details

End: March 11, 2024
More Info: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ng0Kf0H7QIOuFBXZUlTEgA

Join Edda Fields-Black (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.), Kate Masur (Northwestern Univ.), and Erica Ball (Occidental Coll.) for a discussion on Dr. Fields-Black’s book, Combee, which details 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. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines.

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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.

Kate Masur is professor of History at Northwestern University. She has written extensively on race and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, DC (2010), co-author of the National Historic Landmark Theme Study on the Era of Reconstruction (2017, National Park Service, and ), most recently, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the John Phillip Reid Book Award from the American Society for Legal History, and the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History.

Erica L. Ball is a historian who specializes in nineteenth and twentieth-century African American history at Occidental College.Her research explores two overlapping areas: she analyzes the ways African Americans have placed visual, print, and other forms of cultural production in the service of the long freedom struggle, and she examines the ways African Americans have engaged the popular memory of slavery, the abolitionist movement, and the Reconstruction era. Ball is the author of two books. Her first book, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (Georgia, 2012), interrogates the links between early nineteenth-century African American advice literature, antislavery activism, and African American processes of middle-class self-fashioning in the antebellum North. Most recently, she published Madam C. J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), a cultural biography of the groundbreaking African American hair-care pioneer, businesswoman, and philanthropist.