Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero

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A Remarkable Hero

Voted Best Non Fiction 2005

You can't be Serious?!!!!

Bound for the Promised Land - A True Work of Scholarship

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Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero
Kate Clifford Larson
Manufacturer: One World/Ballantine
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom

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Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement

Wanted Dead Or Alive: The True Story Of Harriet Tubman

ASIN: 0345456289
Release Date: 2004-12-28

Book Description

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history—a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the nine decades since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes. Now at last, in this long-overdue biography, historian Kate Clifford Larson gives Harriet Tubman the powerful, intimate, meticulously detailed life she deserves.

Drawing from a trove of new documents and sources as well extensive genealogical research, Larson reveals Tubman as a complex woman— brilliant, shrewd, deeply religious, and passionate in her pursuit of freedom. The descendant of the vibrant, matrilineal Asanti people of the West African Gold Coast, Tubman was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland but refused to spend her life in bondage. While still a young woman she embarked on a perilous journey of self-liberation—and then, having won her own freedom, she returned again and again to liberate family and friends, tapping into the Underground Railroad.

Yet despite her success, her celebrity, her close ties with Northern politicians and abolitionists, Tubman suffered crushing physical pain and emotional setbacks. Stripping away myths and misconceptions, Larson presents stunning new details about Tubman’s accomplishments, personal life, and influence, including her relationship with Frederick Douglass, her involvement with John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and revelations about a young woman who may have been Tubman’s daughter. Here too are Tubman’s twilight years after the war, when she worked for women’s rights and in support of her fellow blacks, and when racist politicians and suffragists marginalized her contribution.

Harriet Tubman, her life and her work, remain an inspiration to all who value freedom. Now, thanks to Larson’s breathtaking biography, we can finally appreciate Tubman as a complete human being—an American hero, yes, but also a woman who loved, suffered, and sacrificed. Bound for the Promised Land is a magnificent work of biography, history, and truth telling.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

A Remarkable Hero.......2007-01-14

This book was exceptionlly well researched. The author did a good job of separating fact from fiction, while acknowledging the many myths about Harriet Tubman that have been part of the oral history surrounding this remarkable woman.

Voted Best Non Fiction 2005.......2006-03-09

An excellent book! You will learn so much more than you ever thought you knew about Harriet and what you did learn in school doesn't hold a candle to who she really is. This is a remarkable book and should be part of every middle school history class. Larson has done an excellent job bringing this much information to us and years of research do it. Remarkable!

You can't be Serious?!!!!.......2006-03-08

This book is woefully and inadequately researched. Here, again, there are those who want to continue to make a buck off the backs of slaves some 141 years later. The good news is that some of us know the truth and reject this as merely an Internet driven collaboration of conjecture. It is nauseating to suggest that Harriet's own account of her life can't be taken as fact. It's typical of these same people to accept, without question, the life recollections of Robert E. Lee or any of the other so-called "great American heroes". Typical yet not surprising. You should stick with subject matter that won't prove you wrong at the end of the day.

Bound for the Promised Land - A True Work of Scholarship.......2005-04-10

Bound for the Promised Land is the first book that I have actually read to the very end, in a long time. I could not put this book down! As I turned page after page, there was wonderful historic fact couched in a way that is easily understood by the reader and placed within a believeable context of time, places, and people whom Harriet Tubman encountered or assisted during her long lifetime.

Kate Clifford Larson brings Harriet Tubman to life because of the many details she includes in the book. I was in awe as to how the author would know such extensive information. Clearly, this book was thoroughly researched. The biographer goes beyond just presenting facts. She also analyzes situations and interprets them. One example concerns why Tubman 'kidnapped' her own niece and brought her to Canada. No other print source that I have read so far has presented a theory as to why that may have occurred.

This book is a must-read for any serious student of history and particularly those who are interested in the Underground Railroad and those abolitionists and conductors who facilitated flights to freedom. Magnificent piece of writing and well worth reading!

Patricia L. Cummings

Informative.......2005-02-06

Who is this woman they called "Moses?" and what did she do to acquire this name?
In this work by Kate Larson we examine the life and workings of Harriet Tubman, a remarkable woman who risked her life for others. The author takes us along the journey of Ms.Tubman's life and her battle for freedom and the freedom of others who were slaves at this time.
The author's work shows her intense research as she carefully outlines and puts together all the pieces of this incredible woman's life. Her writing style is factual yet she draws you along in a gentle storytelling manner that keeps your attention.
The pictures that were included added much realism to the read as pictures certainly help by putting a face on the character you are reading about. I found this work very enlightening and certainly learned a lot about an outstanding woman of history and the era in which she lived.
Shirley Johnson

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.(Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories)(Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American ... An article from: Journal of Southern History

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Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.(Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories)(Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American ... An article from: Journal of Southern History
Wilma King
Manufacturer: Southern Historical Association
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000B7OL52
Release Date: 2005-08-30

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on August 1, 2005. The length of the article is 1978 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.(Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories)(Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero)(Book Review)
Author: Wilma King
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2005
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 71 Issue: 3 Page: 692(5)

Article Type: Book Review

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Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

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Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero
Kate Clifford Larson
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OVGYJQ

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Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero
Kate Clifford Larson
Manufacturer: One World/Ballantine
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OVOHF4

Customer Reviews:

Interesting insight into history of a food that we take for granted.......2007-09-24

Someone scribbled the following on the first page of the introduction of my copy of this book: "NOTE: this work may be of marginal use!!" I disagree.

Sugar is such a heavily-used part of most diets, yet we rarely stop to reflect how it came to be that way. Our dependence on sugar is surely not healthy, yet it is incredibly hard to wean oneself from sugaring so much of what we eat. I found Mintz's discussion on the history of the production and consumption patterns of sugar to be interesting, and the repercussions to our social structures to be even more so. This is still a timely read given the current reflection on the nature of world markets.

Unique.......2007-01-01

Sidney Mintz is a worldly and humane scholar whose
investigation of the role of sugar in the development
of the modern world turns out to be three seperate books.

The first, and most understandable might be called the
History of Sugar Consumption. This is his story of the
meaning attached to sweetness in the western world and how
that meaning changed as sugar became more widely available.

The second, could be called the Power of Sweetness. It is
his unravelling of the close connection between sugar
consumption and the Industrial Era. In this 'book' he credits
the primate love of sweetness, the high caloric yield of
sugar and the lowering prices that efficient production
created with establishing sugar's central place at our tables.

The third book is an attempt to relate sugar to questions of
imperial and class ambitions, power politics and economic
issues. For this reader, at least, these questions seem to
ride along on the coattails of the innate appeal of sugar
as a food, especially in places where wine is expensive and
stimulant drinks prevalent. In short, the arguement of this
third book seems like an attempt to turn the second book on
its head.

Now, I'm told that anthropologists these days like to talk
that way, that they prefer to believe in the power of
institutions rather than the appeal of things. Interesting,
and I think for many ordinary readers, incomprehensible.

None the less, if you leave the occasional theoretical
oddity aside, this is a wonderfully put together story,
provocatively told.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN
9781601640005

Bitter Sweet.......2006-07-29

Mintz provides a fascinating history of sugar, placing it in context within the transatlantic world. Sugar acquired ever increasing importance as the means for its production improved, its availability spread and its price decreased. Underpinning the success of sugar was the tragedy of slavery. Not only did slaves serve the sugar plantations and mills, but Mintz makes a compelling case for sugar's being the single key force behind the firm establishment of black slavery in the western hemisphere.

Political Economy Canon; A Classic That Remade Anthropology and Cultural Studies.......2006-03-14

Sidney W. Mintz's Sweetness and Power situates economic analysis in consumption rather than production. The author believes that a producer's labor and exploitation is not enough to understand the exploitation of production. One must unpack the mythos of demand. Central to this is the idea that rational choice leads liberal individuals to consume products because it is in their best interest. Mintz correctly implies that in the historiography of western consumers and colonial producers, this liberal individual is almost always white, male, and couched in the trappings of "civilization." He criticizes prevailing practices in social anthropology that approach colonized peoples as pristine and discrete, a tendency that also has troubling sway over what he terms "anthropology of modern life." He sees the anthropology rooted in his study of a basic commodity-sugar-as a positive contestation of the bounded primitive as a mode of inquiry and one that connects rather than marginalizes its subjects.

Mintz's engagement with cultural anthropology is based on a sophisticated premise: the way in which canonical anthropology marginalizes the primitive in opposition to civil society is related to the way in which liberal economics marginalizes the producer in opposition to the liberal individual consumer. The term "in opposition to" is appropriate because in this marginalization, both ends are mutually decentered. Both the primitive and the civil as well as production and consumption are on the margins because there is a labor, an exploitation, and an invocation to behavior that defies logic on each end. This, Mintz implies, necessitates a rejection of the prevailing colonial narrative of one-way dominion. For him, the mass-consumption of sugar is an anthropological anomaly. This is the puzzle that leads him to root his study in England from roughly 1650 thru 1900, during which time sugar went from being a lavish luxury to a staple of working class diets. As he notes, there is ample anthropological precedent to model culture and society as resistant to change and resistant to the imposition of new practice and tradition, even amidst a changing milieu that raises contradictions. Thus, contrary to liberal economic theory, demand is not a matter of nature in which rational persons severed from cultural meaning rush toward rational hedonistic consumption with open arms. Indeed, anthropology suggests that nature resists this imposition of change. Because of this, demand must be a structural phenomenon. It must at some juncture interrupt and structure culture in a way that is alien to its natural progression. The author concludes that production must create cultural meaning.

Understanding demand as structure and not nature allows there to be a liminal space between production and consumption. For Mintz, sugar inscribes a genealogy of contact upon this space. He sees the global connectedness of commodity as a new shape in which to group peoples in the study of kinship, religion and other cultural phenomena. In revealing how sugar came to England as science, theology, morality and a bedfellow (or perhaps even a progenitor) of the Enlightenment and other significant social shifts, the author hopes to springboard similar scholarship in cultural studies. The text concludes that the massive success of sugar in imposing a sort of consumptive hegemony in places like England and the United States, while not as significantly restructuring cultural practices in places like France and China, presents fertile ground for future research. If it has a shortfalling, it is the absence of a more explicit centering of power-this is to say that in focusing on the mutual marginalization of production and consumption there is a lack of coherence when it comes to narrating a driving force behind it all. Nonetheless the author makes significant contributions to cultural studies and interdisciplinary scholarship as well as hinting at the potential for deploying commodity as a postnational and contra-national discourse.

How has sugar moved you.......2002-11-17

Mintz carefully places implications that sugar has caused human nature and culture to change and the end of his work, after a brief overview of all that we have been doing with sugar or rather sugar has been doing with us for the past 1000 years. MintzÕs work is divided into 5 sections: Food, Sociality and Sugar; Production; Consumption; Power; and finally Eating and Being. Mintz really hopes to build a base of facts to reveal to us how we as a people have identified with and sought to consume sugar over the past 1000 years and how that has affected us.

Sugar is always a labor intensive project, from the mill, to the distillery, to the storehouse and all the laborers it takes to run these places. Mintz discusses how this need for labor caused the British to look to Africa and other places to find cheap or free labor. With sugar came slavery, and those slaves who did the plantation work generally worked in the Caribbean while the product they created was delivered to British aristocracy.

In the mid-1700Õs sugar is made cheaper and more accessible to the lower classes and at this point shifts in its purpose to sweeten food. And as outlined by the upper statistics, sugar only continues to grow in demand. It is interesting that because sugar started as something precious and hard to come by, when it later became more cheap and accessible to the working class it still seemed to uphold that Òrareness.Ó The working class felt like they were increasing in freedom and status as they started to consume sugar. Sugar and like products Òrepresented the growing freedom of ordinary folks,Ó yet did Sugar really mean freedom?

In analysis of MintzÕs thesis I am most convinced that sugar is a powerful force that has moved us historically and today. Sugar production has not only caused the physical relocation, its consumption has caused us to form class and psychological identity around it; today we still live with the power of sweetness in our everyday life, most of the time not giving it a second thought.
Sugar took slaves from Africa to the new world in America. It created identity in the aristocracy and later a manufactured sense of freedom among the working class. Today it continues to grow in its use across the world and has become an everyday commodity. The more fast paced life becomes in the 21st century, the more consumers are drawn to pre-prepared processed foods consistently with high contents of sugar. Sucrose production separated African families in the 1700s, brought class distinction to EuropeÕs families during its shift to capitalism, and now it severs families from eating together at the dinner table with its processed and fast foods. With these implications either we allow sugar to keep moving us, or we move it off the table, out of the cupboard and dump it into Boston Harbor.

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Sweetness and Power, The Place of Sugar in Modern History
Sidney W. Mintz
Manufacturer: Penquin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000RJODIY

Book Description

From outbreaks of the flesh eating viruses Ebola and Strep A, to death camps in Bosnia and massacres in Rwanda, the media seem to careen from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death. First we're horrified, but each time they turn up the pitch, show us one image more hideous than the next, it gets harder and harder to feel. Meet compassion fatigue--a modern syndrome, Susan Moeller argues, that results from formulaic media coverage, sensationalized language and overly Americanized metaphors.

In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Moeller warns that the American media threatens our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that has seen too much--or too little--to care? Through a series of case studies of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"--disease, famine, death and war--Moeller investigates how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen and revealing why.

Throughout, we hear from industry insiders who tell of the chilling effect of the mega-media mergers, the tyranny of the bottom-line hunt for profits, and the decline of the American attention span as they struggle to both tell and sell a story. But Moeller is insistent that the media need not, and should not, be run like any other business. The media have a special responsibility to the public, and when they abdicate this responsibility and the public lapses into a compassion fatigue stupor, we become a public at great danger to ourselves.

Customer Reviews:

Exposes the Media's Voyeuristic, Shock And Awe Tendencies.......2005-01-24

"At breakfast and at dinner, we can sharpen our own appetites with a plentiful dose of the pornography of war, genocide, destitution and disease." So says one of the first lines in introduction to Compassion Fatigue. With that statement as simultaneously an opener and a teaser of the things to come, Professor Moeller takes the reader on a guided tour of the presentation and commodification of human tragedy and suffering.

Compassion Fatigue tells you the how and the why behind what makes the nightly news, and also reveals why a great many other things do not make the news. While mostly a critique of US based media and journalism, it does reveal the gradual trend towards the 'One World' view of things and events that has come to typify reporting of any sort.

Without intending to do so, the book does much to demonstrate that the media, always locked in competition with other forms of 'programming' for our attention, has resorted to marketing information- current events, as a form of entertainment. In place of in-depth, investigative journalism, we now have soundbites featuring 'talking heads', and the cuter or more obscene the personality (and increasingly both), the better.

Each of the so-called 'Four Horsemen'- war, disease, famine and death, are presented and profiled in turn, with detailed discussion about the mechanics behind their delivery to readers and viewers. This book differs from most critiques of the media because it tells the narrative with the assistance of journalists themselves, in the words of the journalists.

Many people in the media know what they are doing is not only questionable, but in some cases, flat out wrong. However, marketability (how well something will go over with viewers) matters more than anything else. Marketability makes for high ratings, and high ratings in turn makes for fat profits for the parent company. Ergo, the trend towards to self-interested and self-centered journalism, and the tendency to feature celebrity involvement with current events. The latter trend is most pernicious, because it is not necessarily the event, but what they think of it that matters most, as being able to get people's attention is the most important thing, not what's really going on in the world. This in turn is both related to and feeds into the Body Count Syndrome, whereby each tragedy or documented depravity has to be bigger and obscence than the one before it, once again, to get our attention.

Although the book was a bit wearying at points (mostly because of the nine point font of the text), overall the content was top-notch. I especially liked the final chapter, where Professor Moeller compared and contrasted the funerals of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa, both of whom died at the same time. One was tabloid fodder, and the other dedicated her life to bringing a little joy to impoverished and suffering masses of humanity. Yet even in death, one managed to monopolize nearly all media attention for a month, while the other could barely get something less than a one page obituary (even here mostly devoted to how many dignitaries and personalities came to pay their final respects) in TIME magazine. That one observation says a lot about not only the morals and values of the media, but even more about those of us viewers.

The motto of the media should be changed to reflect the sorry state of our times, and should now be: all the news that's (un)fit to print.

Good read, but cliche conclusions.......2001-01-16

Moeller divides her book into six sections; an introduction, a section on media coverage of disease, a chapter on media coverage of famine, a chapter on coverage of assassinations, a chapter on coverage of genocide, and a conclusion. Each section if filled with case studies and alternately amusing and horrifying anecdotes; she recounts, for example, that the editor of one Boston paper said that "the distance from Boston common divided by the number of bodies" decides which stories make the final cut. The book makes a great read (especially relative to the bulk of academic writing), and you'll certainly pick up little tidbits you can later cite in conversations about current events.

The conclusions Moeller draws, however, are cliché. What do you know, the media disproportionately focuses on the US, and most of what we see of Africa and the Middle East is tragedy, so we get a skewed picture. And the media sensationalize everything, and are fond of shallow, sound-bite explanations of complex tragedies. Who would have guessed any of this without reading the book? I also find her conclusions somewhat contradictory; she argues both that excessive coverage of disasters leads to a hardening of the public's sympathies AND that the media need to increase coverage of foreign tragedies. I think she's arguing that the type of coverage needs to be changes - fewer pictures of starving children, more hard-boiled analysis, but her conclusion is so brief she doesn't elaborate much. So while you will probably enjoy the book, and love the stories, I doubt that when you have finished you will feel that you have a better understanding of the American media.

Profoundly important and a good read to boot........1999-02-10

Susan Moeller gets right to the heart of the weaknesses of how the American media covers foreign news and the way the American audience percieves it. But she doesn't just paint a picture of the problems -she spells out some constructive and doable means to fix them. As a journalist myself, I recommended this book to all of my peers -both in the industry and out of it.

The Perfect Holiday Gift.......1998-12-08

Tired of giving gifts that don't mean anything? Then this book is the perfect gift to give to someone you care about. This book teaches us that we need to look closely at what is being fed to us daily in newspapers, TV, and radio. Ms. Moeller forces us to look at how Americans wants their news served to us so we can tolerate it instead of tasting it and truly understanding the complexities. I applaud her bravery in criticizing the mainstream press which will certainly not be interested in reviewing or having her on as a guest. If you care about the world buy this book and give it to as many friends as you can.

This is a very important book........1998-10-12

Criticism of the American press -- broadcast and print -- for its foreign coverage is hardly new but Professor Moeller does a masterful job of exposing the causes and the result of this failure. Her work should open the public's eyes, and, indeed, those of the press itself, to the danger to our democracy if remedy is not forthcoming. -Walter Cronkite

Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death.

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Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death.
Susan D. Moeller
Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0203900375

Download Description

Susan D. Moeller asks why international news has become tabloid in style and light on content - is this a response to audience demands, or does it create a particular sort of audience, one which has seen too much to care?

COMPASSION FATIGUE.(Review) : An article from: Columbia Journalism Review

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COMPASSION FATIGUE.(Review) : An article from: Columbia Journalism Review
Tom Goldstein
Manufacturer: Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00098VADY
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Columbia Journalism Review, published by Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism on July 1, 1999. The length of the article is 727 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: COMPASSION FATIGUE.(Review)
Author: Tom Goldstein
Publication: Columbia Journalism Review (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1999
Publisher: Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
Volume: 38 Issue: 2 Page: 58

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

A tropical rain forest primer for Belize and nearby countries, this authoritative and entertaining book is a must for travelers, students, teachers and conservationists. Written by internationally renowned zoologist Dr. Robert Horwich and ecologist Dr. Jon Lyon, and now in its third printing, A Belizean Rain Forest offers detailed yet easy to read descriptions of the flora, fauna natural history and people of the Community Baboon Sanctuary. Conveniently arranged by topic, this book allows the reader to quickly look up in-depth information on subjects of interest. It gives a thorough understanding of the importance of the rain forest and also presents a community-based method of rain forest conservation.

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