The Society of Civil War Historians announced that Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is the recipient of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Fields-Black earned the award for COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War.
The book also received the Pulitzer Prize in History earlier this month.
In announcing the prize, the Society of Civil War Historian said: “The scope of this book is simply dazzling. From its marvelous recreation of Maryland’s eastern shore to its haunting evocation of the Sea Islands to its depiction of the South Carolina interior redolent with the light and shadow of the ponderous Combahee River, COMBEE brings to life different Black communities whose members transcended geographical, cultural, and linguistic differences to wrest their way out of bondage, turn the tide of a key Union military campaign, strike at Confederate war-making capacity, and establish the foundations of Gullah-Geechee culture. COMBEE deepens and enriches our understanding of the lived experience of emancipation as liberation and as humanitarian crisis all at once. It advances conversations on slave flight and resistance before the war, directly linking the antebellum Underground Railroad with the wartime slave rebellion that Fields-Black argues Tubman’s Combahee raid really was. It brings to life the challenge and peril of destroying one economic system and trying to bring about another amidst its ruins. And Fields-Black does all of that without losing sight of the real people who proudly called themselves Combee. This truly astounding book stands in a class by itself.”
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