Larson, Kate Clifford

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LARSON, Kate Clifford

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Simmons College, B.A. (economics and history), 1980, M.A., 1995; Northeastern University, M.B.A., 1986; University of New Hampshire, Ph.D. (history).

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Ballantine Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: National Park Service, Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study, consultant. Underground Railroad Coalition of Delaware, advisory board member.

AWARDS, HONORS: Legacy Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society; Price research fellowship, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; fellowship, John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, Brown University; Margaret Storrs Grierson scholar-in-residence fellowship, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; Mary Catherine Mooney fellowship, Boston Athenaeum; Lerner-Scott Dissertation Award for best dissertation in women's history, Organization of American Historians.

WRITINGS:

Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, Ballantine (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Kate Clifford Larson's biography Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero is one of the first scholarly biographies of the African-American abolitionist to appear in decades. Harriet Tubman was a leader in the Underground Railroad movement that allowed many slaves to escape north to freedom. Her early life was relatively unexplored until Larson uncovered new sources that allowed her to tell the abolitionist's story in much greater detail.

Born in Maryland, Tubman escaped slavery at the age of about twenty-seven. During the U.S. Civil War she returned to the south to help other slaves find their way to freedom. "Amazing success greeted all her efforts," explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "and after the war, Tubman spent years trying to coax a pension from the government." Larson has "done extensive and imaginative research in local historical sources," stated Drew Gilpin Faust in the New York Times Book Review. According to Gilpin Faust, Larson used "the papers of antislavery activists who interacted with Tubman" and the "correspondence of an earlier Tubman biographer who in the 1940s interviewed individuals who had been alive long enough to remember her." Booklist reviewer Vanessa Bush called the book a "welcome biographical [analysis] of a remarkable woman," while Smithsonian contributor Fergus M. Bordewich commented that "Larson has brought to life the woman she calls 'part of the core American historical memory.'"