Praise for
BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND: HARRIET TUBMAN, PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN HERO
by Kate Clifford Larson
"What a glorious book! Kate Larson's magnificent biography of the life of the real Harriet Tubman deserves the nation's attention. Grounded in meticulous research, BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND solves the mysteries and silences about the legendary "Moses" of Underground Railroad fame. With clarity, grace, and skill, Larson brilliantly captures the truly remarkable spirit of a genuine American heroine.
We are all in Larson's debt."
-- Darlene Clark Hine, co-author, A SHINING THREAD OF HOPE: THE HISTORY OF BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA.
Professor, University of Michigan, and Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Kate Larson "has produced the most thoroughly researched account of [Tubman's] life, winning advance praise from a variety of American historians who are calling her book, Bound for the Promised Land, an extraordinary achievement."
Gary Dorsey, Baltimore Sun, January 25, 2004.
"In the first scholarly biography of Harriet Tubman, Kate Clifford Larson rescues her from the “underground” of knowledge, from unused and unseen primary documents, shedding new light on this American icon of freedom. Larson’s painstaking research and vivid imagery separate truth from myth to reveal a life greater than legend."
-- Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Professor of History and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, and author of RIGHTEOUS DISCONTENT: THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN THE BLACK BAPTIST CHURCH, 1880-1920
"... there's no real competition.
After six years of turning over stones, the intrepid Kate Clifford Larson breaks the new ground on Tubman legacy and legend in Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero ... Larson's exhaustive study will be the steppingstone for future scholars of Tubman, and thus the best choice for students, teachers and history buffs."
Jean Thompson, Associate Editor, Baltimore Sun, February 1, 2004
"It is a risky business to tamper with a national icon and trickier still to convey the full dimension of the individual behind the legend. But Kate Clifford Larson has accomplished both in her brilliant biography of Harriet Tubman..."
Fergus M. Bordwich, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2004
"It is Kate Clifford Larson, the newcomer, who has delivered the gem... Bound For the Promised Land is astonishingly good, a better debut than any author has the right to wish for."
Kevin Canfield, The Dallas Morning News, August 13, 2004.
"Meticulously researched and written, this intriguing book promises to be one of the best of 2004."
John C. Walter, The Seattle Times, February 8, 2004.
"Bound for the Promise Land is an extraordinary achievement. Heroically researched, movingly written, it transforms a legend into a flesh-and-blood human being and brings a critical era in our history vividly to life."
-- Jacquelyn D. Hall, Spruill Professor of History, University of North Carolina, President of the Organization of American Historians, and Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
"Perhaps the best-known African American female historical figure because of her courageous work on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman's life as a warrior woman is elegantly captured in Kate Larson's riveting biography, the first one to be published for adults after a sixty-year hiatus. Because of her painstaking documentation of the wretched worlds that Tubman inhabited and ultimately recreated, readers confront a genuine hero, not the fiction of contemporary media. BOUND FOR THE PROMISED LAND is the story of a legendary woman we thought we knew, but Larson's portrait is more focused, more complex, more satisfying..."
-- Beverly Guy-Sheftall, co-author of GENDER TALK: THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMEN’S EQUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITIES.
Director of the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College.
"Larson has succeeded in writing a fascinating book that not only illuminates the life and character of a complicated woman, but the social and political intricacies of the harrowing times in which she lived, and the many people - some celebrated personalities of the day and many ordinary folks of tremendous courage - who helped her along the way."
Lorrie Lykins for the St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 22, 2004.
"Larson's exceptionally well researched biography of Harriet Tubman draws on thorough historical detective work to offer a compelling life story. Along with a realistic portrayal of slave life and an accurate account of the escapes and rescues that made Tubman a mythic figure, we learn about the daily struggles of a poor, free black woman to support herself and her extended family, and to earn the compensation due her for her service as a nurse and spy during the Civil War. A welcome addition to the literature of women's and African American history."
-- Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History, Stanford University, and author of NO TURNING BACK: THE HISTORY OF FEMINISM AND THE FUTURE OF WOMEN.
"The most impressive of [the new biographies]is Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero... The book combines a strict reading of the sources and a healthy questioning of earlier accounts with a real gift for fulsome and lively narrative, inventive research, and rigorous cross-checking. Larson's determination to tap all relevant sources is clear. She draws on everything from court records to census reports, historical studies, records of manumissions, slave testimonies, Orphans Court records, chattel records, documents and interviews conducted by
earlier biographers, and many other sources of nformation.
Larson suffers from the same dearth of sources as the other scholars, but instead of turning inward to try to get at something that is inaccessible, she turns outward, to the land, family (her own and that of her masters),
local politics, work conditions -- everything comprising the various settings in which Tubman lived her life. And in doing so, she makes Tubman real by making us feel what it was like to be in the situations in which she found herself."
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education; April 30, 2004.
"Larson... has done her homework, and her book is essential for those interested in Tubman and her causes."
Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer, February 8, 2004.
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