Community Ink: Pulitzer Prize Winner, Dr. Edda L. Fields Black

Join us for a conversation with local author and professor, Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War. Harriet Tubman's legendary life is widely known: escaping enslavement, leading others to freedom via the Underground Railroad, and tirelessly fighting for change. But a crucial chapter often overlooked is her daring Civil War service as a spy for the US Army, detailed in Fields-Black's groundbreaking book. A direct descendant of a soldier who fought in the raid, Fields-Black unveils Tubman's command of spies and pilots and intelligence gathered from freedom seekers, which led to a raid that liberated 756 enslaved people from bondage on seven rice plantations. It was the largest slave rebellion in US history. Through unexamined documents, she brings to life the Combahee River Raid and the untold stories of those freed, their resilience, and the lasting impact of Tubman's heroism.

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center. She has written extensively about the transnational 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 consulted for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's permanent exhibit, "Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina." 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.

Throughout her career, Fields-Black has used interdisciplinary sources and methods to uncover the voices of historical actors in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora who did not author written sources. Her latest book re-examines Harriet Tubman's legendary life, much of which is widely known: escaping enslavement, leading others to freedom via the Underground Railroad, and tirelessly fighting for change. But a crucial chapter often overlooked is her daring Civil War service as a spy for the US Army, detailed in Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black's groundbreaking book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. Fields-Black unveils Tubman's command of spies, scouts, and pilots and intelligence gathered from freedom seekers, which led to a raid that liberated 756 enslaved people from bondage on seven rice plantations. It was the largest slave rebellion in US history. Through
previously unexamined documents, she brings to life the Combahee River Raid and the untold stories of those freed, their resilience, and the lasting impact of Tubman's heroism.

Fields-Black is a descendant of both Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, South Carolina and a USCT soldier (her great-great-great grandfather) from Beaufort County who 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.
COMBEE has been named the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Institute Lincoln Prize winner, winner of the Society of Civil War Historian’s 2025 Tom Watson Brown Award, winner of the South Carolina Historical Society’s 2024 George C. Rogers Jr. Award, and winner of the Association for Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society’s 2024 Marsha M. Greenlee History Award. In addition, COMBEE earned Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historian’s 2025 James A. Rawley Prize and is a finalist for the Columbia School of Journalism’s 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize and finalist for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History's Book Prize. In addition, COMBEE was named among "The Best Nonfiction Books of 2024," by Bloomberg.com," "Also Recommended" among the "Best Books of 2024," in The New Yorker, "Best Civil War Books of 2024," Civil War Monitor, "Top 10 History Books: 2024," Booklist, Oxford University Press Best "Books of 2024".