--- title: Combee Won the 2025 Pulitzer for History by Telling Harriet Tubman's Civil War Raid Through the People She Freed description: "Edda L. Fields-Black's Combee won the 2025 Pulitzer for History: Harriet Tubman's Civil War raid, told by a descendant of a soldier who fought in it." author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-02T11:54:55.036Z updated: 2026-11-02T11:54:55.054Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/combee-pulitzer-2025 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-38383667.webp categories: Author Journeys content_type: Profile region: Americas publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Edda L. Fields-Black description: "Edda L. Fields-Black is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Dietrich College Humanities Center. Her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War shared the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History. She is a descendant of a soldier who fought in the raid." jobTitle: Historian and author sameAs: - https://www.pulitzer.org/node/edda-l-fields-black --- You probably picture Harriet Tubman leading people north on foot, by night, along the Underground Railroad. Edda L. Fields-Black's *Combee* shows you a chapter most films and biographies leave out. During the Civil War, the Union Army hired Tubman to work behind enemy lines in South Carolina. On 2nd June 1863 she guided Union gunboats up the Combahee River, and by the end of the day hundreds of enslaved people had left the rice plantations for freedom. ### Book: Combee *Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War* By Edda L. Fields-Black Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History. Edda L. Fields-Black tells the story of the June 1863 raid in which Harriet Tubman guided Union gunboats up South Carolina's Combahee River and 756 enslaved people freed themselves in a single day. A descendant of one of the soldiers, she rebuilds the lives of the people who escaped. [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/combee/edda-l-fields-black/9780197552797) The book is joint winner of the [2025 Pulitzer Prize for History](https://www.pulitzer.org/node/edda-l-fields-black). The Pulitzer board called it 'a richly-textured and revelatory account' of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day. Oxford University Press published it in 2024, and it has also won the Gilder Lehrman Institute's Lincoln Prize. ## A spy ring, three gunboats and a river of rice fields Tubman spent months in Beaufort, South Carolina, before the raid, and she ran a ring of spies, scouts and river pilots who mapped the Confederate defences. On the night of the raid, she and her crew piloted Black soldiers of the Second South Carolina Volunteers and their white commanders up the Combahee in three gunboats. The soldiers set fire to the rice plantations along the banks. When the gunboats sounded their steam whistles, enslaved men, women and children ran from the fields to the riverbank and climbed aboard. Many of the men freed that day enlisted in the same regiment and went on to fight for the freedom of others still enslaved in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. ## Families, sweethearts and neighbours rebuilt from the archives Fields-Black tells the story through the people who escaped, not only through Tubman and the officers. She rebuilt their lives from records historians had barely touched, including Tubman's own Civil War pension file and the bills of sale, wills and estate papers of the planter families. You meet extended families, neighbours, members of the same praise houses and couples split apart by sale, and you follow many of them after the war, when they returned to the land they had fled, bought plots of it and raised families. The rice fields themselves become a character. Fields-Black describes the tidal swamps of the Lowcountry as deadly places to work, where malaria was a constant threat and the skill of enslaved West Africans made the planters rich. ## A historian who found her own ancestor in the story The book began as family history. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of Hector Fields, her great-great-great-grandfather, who freed himself from slavery in Beaufort County, enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers in March 1863 and fought in the raid. She traced him through his pension file, and that search opened the way to the whole community that freed itself on the Combahee. She is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and directs its Dietrich College Humanities Center. Her first book, *Deep Roots*, followed rice farmers from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas. She also takes history off the page and on to the stage, as a librettist, and her research inspired an exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston in 2024. 'As a descendant, we need to know our ancestors' names,' she told the radio station WFAE. ![The gold Pulitzer Prize medal, showing Benjamin Franklin in profile with the words Honoris Causa.](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pulitzer-medal-obverse-svg.webp) *Photo: Medal design by Daniel Chester French. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain* ## Two winners and one finalist The 2025 history prize was shared between two books: *Combee* and Kathleen DuVal's *Native Nations*, a thousand-year history of Indigenous North America. The third finalist was Seth Rockman, with *Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery*, which follows the cloth, shoes and tools made in the North for the enslaved workers of the South. ## A year later the prize went to the people who tried to change the Constitution The 2026 Pulitzer for History went to Jill Lepore for *We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution*, the story of the ordinary Americans who tried to amend it. Rich Books Magazine covers it in its daily series on the 2026 winners: [We the People Won the 2026 Pulitzer for History With the Story of Americans Who Tried to Rewrite the Constitution](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/we-the-people-pulitzer-2026). Read the two books together and you see the same instinct: both put the people left out of the founding story back at its centre. ## What stays with you after the last chapter You finish *Combee* with names, not numbers. The 756 people freed on the Combahee become mothers, husbands, children and soldiers, and Tubman becomes a military commander as well as a legend. The next time you see her face on a poster, you will think of the gunboats and the rice fields. **Read it if** you want the full story of Harriet Tubman, you love history built from family records, or you are tracing your own ancestors and want to see how far the archives can take you. ### Buy the book [Combee on Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/combee/edda-l-fields-black/9780197552797) / [Combee on Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/9780197552797) ### Also in this piece Native Nations on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/book/native-nations/kathleen-duval/9781805226031) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/native+nations+duval) Plantation Goods on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/plantation+goods+rockman) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/plantation+goods+rockman) Deep Roots on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/deep+roots+fields-black) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/deep+roots+fields-black) **About Edda L. Fields-Black** Historian and author Edda L. Fields-Black is a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Dietrich College Humanities Center. Her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War shared the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History. She is a descendant of a soldier who fought in the raid. *Next in the series: Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal, joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History.*