 The source is a biography of Harriet Tubman, and it was written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, who knew Tubman's family from Auburn, New York, and knew Tubman herself, and wrote the story of Tubman's life to try to help raise money in Tubman's older age when she was quite poor. It gives us a very close account of Harriet Tubman's life, which is valuable in part because Tubman wasn't literate. She didn't read or write English. So the fact that she actually sat down with Sarah Bradford and told her story to Bradford means we can come pretty close to what it was that Harriet Tubman experienced. Bradford ended up writing two different versions of this biography. The first one was written in 1868, published in 1869, and it was written really for a clearly intended purpose. Harriet Tubman was poor. She was struggling to get a pension from the US government for her work during the Civil War as a nurse and also as a spy, and she hadn't been successful. So she really needed money just to live on and to take care of her household. And her community members in Auburn, New York thought that telling her life story could be a way to earn money for her. So this creates a limitation on the source. It was written so that it would get an audience who would pay money to hear the story. And that means that there could be some aspects of the story of Tubman's life that would be told for this audience, and some that could be held back because the audience might not want to pay to hear about it. Well Harriet Tubman is, she's a mythic figure in African American history, in African American women's history, American women's history, and American history. She has an incredible life story, and I think that has been a wonderful thing, but also it has been limiting because she has become a larger-than-life almost stereotype in the ways that we think about the history of slavery. And she's often talked about in Black History Month, for example, but only with a sentence or two about her life. So part of the challenge in studying Tubman's life is to try to get beyond this picture of a superhuman person who had incredible strength and did all these things that seen them possible. It's very difficult to get at the sense that Harriet Tubman was a real person. She was born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland. She had a very, very difficult childhood. She was hired out by her master at a very young age. When she was only five, she was sent to work for another family, and she had charge of an infant, a five-year-old, was a babysitter for an infant. And she was expect to know how to care for this child and to keep it quiet through the night. And of course, she couldn't, so she would be whipped by her mistress for not taking proper care of this baby. Tubman was a real person, and she suffered real trials, real hardships under slavery. And I think that that aspect of her life gets covered over when we only think of her as the woman who went back to the south to save scores of slaves. Well, she was born around 1820. It's not exactly clear when she was born because records about slaves are often limited. And when she was a young woman, she decided to escape. She had already lost sisters who had been sold, and she thought that her best chance of having any kind of future was to secure her own freedom. So she organized her own escape in 1849. She made it to Philadelphia, and she then spent the next decade dedicating her life to freeing other people who were enslaved, her family, other people she knew, and then also strangers. And it's really, it's mind-blowing to think about the incredible dedication that Harriet Tubman had to liberty when she wasn't going on trips to the south to free people. She was working in the north to earn money to pay for her trips. So she did this for about ten years, and around 1858 she went to maybe semi-retirement and she wasn't going back into the south herself, but she was using her home in New York as a place where fugitives who were continuing to head north could stop and have safe haven. And then when the Civil War came, she was very active working for the Union troops. She had an incredible set of skills and talents. So in addition to being someone who knew the landscape well enough to be able to help slaves escape, she was really smart and she organized this spiring to bring information from the South Carolina interior to the federal troops. She was also very caring. She was a nurse who used her knowledge of native plants to try to help the soldiers.