The passaoye states that reliable evidence that modern humans bred with Neanderthals could come frotn Gomparillg: musclllature marks found on fossils. skeletal structures of each group. "ACT•tC 33 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. Passage111 ulates abollt what she cannot know: with such:interjec- 55 tions as 'one can irnagirie" or 'there is every reason to believe., Larson and Huulez tend to coiijecture less and instead to supply the reader with the considerable infor- ttiation thev have collecLed-sometimes, it seèms, n]oIe because they have found li than because it adds signifi- 60 cantly to our understanding of ThbrnaTr's life. HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article 'Gen- eral Tubman. by Dlew Gilpin Faust <t02004 by The New York Times Company). Varri¢t Tubman is far better kJJown American populaT culture and among schoolchildren than she is in the seIiolls historical literature. There has been no adult . biography sincé 1943. Now three scholars have.pub- 5 lished studies almost simultaneously. Who is Halet Tubman 2nd why should we care about her? What can we know of hcr lif,e, how can we know it and bow should it shapè our understandino of American history. Tubman-or at least the "private woman Ilumez seeks-laigely eludes us still. But Humez spends less than half her book on a biographical treatment of Tubrrian. The final 200 pages Lonsider the contempo- 65 rary stories and texts through Mihich we know TubInan, with most of this space devoted to excerpts from the documents themselves. Humez has compiled what she calls Tubrnan's 'core stories, accounts of her life Tubman told iegularly in her .public appearances: and 70 descriptions wIitten by those who int¢racted with her. Presented as 2 chronology of her life, these mateTials paint a far more v2vid portrait than any biographer's account. The reader gains not just glitnpses of Tubn]an, but sees how she collfollnded even those adrnirers who 75 still could not comprehend a black 'wom&n Th'ho behaved like the bial'est of men. Unable to deal w'ith her complexity, her inherent challenge to every expec- tation of race and sex, history in the early 20th century all but forgot her. An era of groiiiing racial equality 80 rediscovered her only to reduce her to myth. Tubn]an was born a slave on Maryland's Easiern 10 Shore sometime in the carly 1820's. In 1849, fearing she would be sold, Tubman fled north, connectin(T With antiglavery activists through what came to be knowll as the L'uderground Railroad. She retllTned to the South o£e than a. dozeii times to lead her brother, parents . 15 and, uLti]nately, about 70 individuals to freedom. By the late 1850's, Tubman was appearing on the antislavèry . lecture circuit and was widely hailed as a heroine across the North. During the Civil War, Tubman seri'ed 'as teacher, laundress, cook. spy and scout for the Union 20 foTces, helping. to connect Northern troops with net- works of slave inforjnation. In June 1863, she played a crucial role in a Union raid in'south Carolina that liber- . ated more than 700 slaves. These three biograpbies leave Us still searching foi Harriet Tubman, still lln8ure how this particular slave woman was able to transcend.the constraints her era and her society placed upon her. But we noThi have help 85 in our pursuit. If read with the care Humez's intioduc- tion to the documentary section of her book pIescribes, Lhe collection of Tubman sources she has asSebled. provides thè b&sis for a, far fuller and more complex portrait than has hitherto been available. After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, N.Y., 25 where she struggled econoEnically the rest of heJ life, ndertaking domestic work and public speaking to sup- port herself and dedicating much of her energy to phil- anthropic efforts on behalf of the freed people. She also became a regular speakei at woman suffrage gather- 30 illgs, dellianding. to know if women's 141drtime deeds "do not place woman as man's equal, what do??? i iibtllan J TailA ed illitera:e her er,tire liie. Sh= lejt not a single document in her own hand. To find, as Jean M. Humez sèeks to do in Harriet Tubman.. Thé Life and 35 the Life Stories, "the private woinan whose life has vir- tually.disappeared behind the heroic public icon,, is no small cballenge. Hutnez cites the "advantage of a much larger nutnbei of PTI]naiy souices" than earlier students . of TubTtLan. Indtred, she and Kate Clifford.Larson, in 40 her first book, Boundfor the. Promised Land, have both 'done extensive and imagillative iesearch ill local histor- ical sources that tell us almost u]oie than we want to know abollt tbc Eastern Shore in the mid-19th century: ill tbe papeis of antislavery activists who interacted 45 With Tubman. in the correspondence of an earlier Tubman biogiapheI who iJ] the 1940's interviewed indi- ViduS who had been alive long enough to remeinber her.
