| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jean M. Humez. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography Series.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 471. $45.00.

Harriet Tubman is "still the most famous African American female hero," and this book attempts to sort out how and why that came to be the case. Historiographically, this study is part of a body of scholarship that investigates the role black women played in American history and the ways in which they sought to shape the representations of that history. Like her contemporaries, Tubman commandeered her own legacy, although not always to the extent she would have liked. However, Jean M. Humez believes that Tubman "produced a self-authored life story" and one of the central tasks of this study is to evaluate the differences between how Tubman was presented by others and how she presented—through life stories—her own history. The book is divided into four parts—"The Life," "Life Stories," "Stories and Sayings," and "Documents"—rendering the text part biography, part archive, and part folklore. For example, in "Stories and Sayings," the author has "assembled every individual life history story" she was able to locate, including the three previously published biographies, into a "hypothetical version of Tubman's autobiography" (p. 7). Unconventional as it is, this is a generous and arduous endeavor, providing scholars with innumerable sources and citations for future research.

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