Harriet Tubman is one of the most inspiring and well-known figures in American history. Born into slavery, she escaped and made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the Underground Railroad. She was an extraordinary, brave woman who inspired many with her relentless drive to help other slaves to freedom.
Tubman’s early life
Tubman was born Araminta Ross, but her actual birthday is unknown, and estimates place it between 1820 – 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Tubman’s mother, a very religious woman, called her daughter ‘Araminta’ after a passage in the Bible book about Moses.
She was the fifth of nine children. Her parents were Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green. Tubman’s owners rented her out to neighbors as a domestic servant by the age of five. Early signs of her resistance to slavery and its abuses came at age twelve when she intervened to keep her master from beating an enslaved man who tried to escape. She was hit in the head with a two-pound weight, leaving her with a lifetime of severe headaches and narcolepsy.
When she was young, Tubman worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy white family. One day a new slave, who had escaped from his plantation, came to the house. The slaves were given food and locked in their rooms for the night. The new slave was strong and healthy; he hit the door so hard that he split it open. He ran out, and the white family feared he would go to the law. They told Tubman to help them catch the slave. She refused because she knew that if she helped them, they would later blame her for the escape and punish her. The slave was never caught.
Freedom from Slavery
In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, Tubman married a free black man named John Tubman. He was a carpenter and supported her in her efforts to help slaves escape. In the spring of 1863, a fugitive slave named Charles Nalle ran away from his master in Virginia. A manhunt was started to find him and bring him back. He was caught by slave catchers and put into jail. Tubman heard about this, and she knew what would happen to him. She dressed like a man and went back into the slave states. She had to be very careful not to get caught herself.
Tubman could get into jail, but it wasn’t easy. She had to bribe one of the guards with five dollars. Tubman carried a pistol and a knife. When she got into the jail, her gun was cocked and pointed at the head of the man who was guarding Charles Nalle. Before he could get his gun, she held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Then she took Charles Nalle out of jail. Tubman carried a small compass to help her find her way through the woods.
Conductor On The Underground Railroad
She was very good at finding her way through the woods. After escaping, she returned to Maryland to help other slaves flee, including her family. Her family lived in Cambridge, Maryland. She knew they would be captured and sent back to slavery if she went there to get them. So she sent her brother to go and get them. He pretended to be a slave trader and rescued her parents and siblings. A doctor named William Still helped Tubman by recording the names of slaves that escaped from their owners. She then went back into the south and got them out. She usually charged $10 to take a group of slaves to freedom in the north. She made several trips and helped over 300 slaves reach freedom in Canada.
In one trip, Tubman led seven people on a two-month-long journey. They traveled at night, hiding by day. They would travel about 10 miles each night and rest during the day. This was called “the underground railroad” because the slaves had to travel on secret paths that ran beneath stations along their journey. They could take a steamboat ride to freedom in New York when they reached Pennsylvania.
While Tubman was helping slaves travel to freedom, she became a spy for the union. She would lead Union soldiers to Confederate soldiers and supply trains. No one knows how many lives she saved. After the Civil War, Tubman worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau. She helped thousands of freed slaves find jobs. She helped them get food, clothing, and shelter. Without her help, many of these freed slaves would have died from sickness or starvation. She also helped many freed slaves to learn how to read and write.
Later years and legacy
In 1869, Tubman moved to Auburn, New York. There she opened a home for poor and elderly black people. Tubman organized the Aid Association of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1896. She also helped white people that were being persecuted. Tubman died on March 10, 1913. She was buried in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. Her home in Auburn was turned into a National Historic Site in 1976.
In 1984, Congress passed legislation to give her a special pension. In 2002, the U.S. Department of the Interior recognized her as a National Historic Person. She is remembered as one of the greatest Americans ever.
The definitive biography of one of the most courageous women in American history “reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend” (Newsday).
Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America’s most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harper’s Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet.
Now, in a biography widely praised for its impeccable research and its compelling narrative, Harriet Tubman is revealed for the first time as a singular and complex character, a woman who defied simple categorization.
“A thrilling reading experience. It expands outward from Tubman’s individual story to give a sweeping, historical vision of slavery.” –NPR’s Fresh Air
A new photography exhibition is giving visitors to the Imperial War Museum in London a different perspective on the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. The images on display were taken by the perpetrators of the atrocities, not the victims.
Renee Salt, 93, an Auschwitz survivor, at the Seeing Auschwitz exhibition. Photograph: PR
The exhibition, which opened this week, features more than 200 photographs and documents from the SS-run camp in Oswiecim, Poland. Most of the images were taken by members of the SS, the paramilitary force that ran Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War.
The photographs were found by chance in 2009 in an album belonging to Wilhelm Brasse, an inmate who worked as a photographer at Auschwitz. The photographs were taken They offer a rare insight into how the Nazis wanted to be seen – as efficient administrators and guards carrying out their duties – rather than as murderers.
The photos were most likely taken by SS men Ernst Hofmann and Bernhard Walter. They were open about their role in the exterminations, sometimes standing in an elevated position such as the roof of a train, for better composition and perspective.
“These pictures show that they [the perpetrators] were proud of what they did,” said exhibition curator Robert Jan van Pelt. “They saw themselves as civil servants who had a very dirty job to do but they did it well.”
“These photographs are not neutral sources at all: we are looking at a piece of reality but seen from the Nazi perspective,” said Paul Salmons, its lead curator.
The pictures were taken over a three-month period in 1944, when about 400,000 people, almost all Jews, were killed at Auschwitz. In total, 1.1 million people were murdered there. The album is a “remarkable historical source that has dominated our understanding of the place. But it’s also very problematic,” said Salmons.
Many of the photographs on display are of inmates being marched to their deaths or waiting in line to be killed in gas chambers. Others show corpses being piled up or burned in crematoria.
The Imperial War Museum’s new exhibition provides a chilling reminder of the horrors perpetrated at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps during the Second World War. The images on display offer a rare insight into how the Nazis wanted to be seen – as efficient administrators and guards carrying out their duties – rather than as murderers. This exhibition is a must-see for anyone interested in history or human rights.
Seeing Auschwitz is located at 81 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD until end of December
There are not enough superlatives to describe this incredibly brave woman, Nancy Wake. She is considered one of our greatest heroines. Discover the incredible story of Nancy Wake or as the Gestapo called her “The White Mouse.” After you have stopped watching the videos, ask yourself how terrified must Nancy have been to do all that she did and get she did it all even after her husband was murdered by the Gestapo. She was FIERCE. How many Allied soldiers and Jewish people did she save? She probably never knew but they owed their lives to her bravery.
Here’s a list of the medals and honours she was given
George Medal : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
1939-45 Star : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
France and Germany Star : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
French Officer of the Legion of Honour : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
French Croix de Guerre : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
United States Medal of Freedom : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
French Medaille de la Resistance : Ensign N G A Wake, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Special Operations Executive)
Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) – February 2004
Nancy Wake, a prominent figure in the French Resistance during the Second World War, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 30 August 1912. Her family moved to Sydney, where she grew up, when Nancy was just 20 months old. She ran away from home at the age of 16 and found work as a nurse, but a windfall enabled her to leave Australia for Europe in 1932. Wake settled in Paris, working for the Hearst group of newspapers as a journalist.
As the 1930s progressed, the rise of German Fascism formed the basis of many of Wake’s stories. In 1935 she visited Vienna and Berlin where the overt and violent anti-Semitism formed in her a desire to oppose Nazism. In November 1939 she married Henri Fiocca, a wealthy industrialist, in Marseilles. Six months later Germany invaded France. Wake and Fiocca joined the fledgling Resistance after France’s surrender in 1940.
Her growing involvement in the Resistance saw Wake and her husband assisting in the escape of Allied servicemen and Jewish refugees from France into neutral Spain. Fearful of being captured she too fled Marseilles and, after several thwarted attempts and a brief period in prison, Wake escaped across the Pyrenees. In June 1943 she reached England where she began working in the French Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
After a period of training, Wake returned to France in April 1944 to help organise the Resistance before D-Day. Working in the Auvergne region, Wake was engaged in organising parachute drops of arms and equipment, and after D-Day, was involved in combat with bodies of German troops sent to destroy the Maquis.
Upon liberation, Wake learned that her husband, Henri, had been killed by the Gestapo in August 1943. In September 1944 she left the Resistance and went to SOE Headquarters in Paris, and then to London in mid-October. After the war she was decorated by Britain, France and the United States but, being unable to adapt to life in post-war Europe, she returned to Australia in January 1949 aged 37. Shortly afterwards she ran for the Liberal Party against Labor’s ‘Doc’ Evatt and, having been narrowly defeated, made a second attempt in 1951, again unsuccessfully.
Unsatisfied with life in Australia, Wake returned to England. In 1957 she married John Forward, an RAF officer. The couple returned to Australia in 1959. A third attempt to enter politics also failed and she and Forward ultimately retired to Port Macquarie where they lived until his death in 1997. In December 2001 she left Australia for England where she lived out her remaining years.
Wake’s medals are on display in the Second World War gallery at the Australian War Memorial.
There is also a magnificent book by Peter Fitzsimons called Nancy Wake. See below the videos for the link to the book!
The riveting, untold history of a group of heroic women reporters who revolutionized the narrative of World War II—from Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband, Ernest Hemingway, to Lee Miller, a Vogue cover model turned war correspondent.
The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II Buy from Amazon
On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.
The Correspondents follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who got the scoop on Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a Red Cross ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a “society girl columnist” turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first English journalist to break the news of World War II; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.
From chasing down sources and narrowly dodging gunfire to conducting tumultuous love affairs and socializing with luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt, Picasso, and Man Ray, these six women are captured in all their complexity.With her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for the scoop.
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist who explored, mapped, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making due to her knowledge and contacts, built up through extensive travels in Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia. Bell helped support the Hashemite dynasties in what is today Jordan as well as in Iraq. She played a major role in establishing and helping administer the modern state of Iraq, using her unique perspective from her travels and relations with tribal leaders throughout the Middle East. During her lifetime she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials and exerted an immense amount of power. She has been described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection”.
Presented by Lisa Cooper, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of British Columbia Encounters with Ancient Splendors: Gertrude Bell’s Archaeological Discoveries and Research in Mesopotamia, 1909-1914
Encounters with Ancient Splendors: Gertrude Bell’s Archaeological Discoveries and Research in Mesopotamia, 1909-1914 Recent biographies highlight many aspects of the extraordinary life of Gertrude Bell, an early 20th century Englishwoman known for her bold travels to remote regions in the Middle East and her role in the creation of the country of Iraq. But most of these accounts tend to pass rather quickly over the one thing that drew Bell to the Middle East time and time again, and which continued to be a driving force until the end of her life: archaeology. This lecture attempts to fill that important gap concerning our appreciation of Bell by relating, through her own photographs, journal entries, books and letters, the tremendous effort she made to describe ancient monuments and antiquities, and the breadth to which she gained an understanding of the history and culture of the antique lands through which she passed. Special emphasis is placed on Bell’s travels through Mesopotamia and her investigation of several key Islamic period archaeological sites for which she developed a particular interest and specialization.
Bell’s letters home
Whenever there was snow we sank in it up to the waist… I nearly took a straight cut on to the glacier, for I slipped on a bit of iced rock into a snow gully till the rope fortunately caught me. We all cut our hands over that incident, but it was otherwise the most comfortable part of the descent. The Alps, 18 July 1902
Such an arrival! Sir Percy made me most welcome and said a house had been allotted to me… a tiny, stifling box of a place in a dirty little bazaar. Fortunately, I had not parted from my bed and bath. These I set up and further unpacked one of my boxes which had been dropped into the Tigris and hung out all the things to dry on the railing of the court. Baghdad, April 20 1917
I don’t think I shall ever be able to detach myself permanently from the fortunes of this country…. it’s a wonderful thing to feel the affection and confidence of a whole people round you. But oh to be at the end of the war and to have a free hand! Baghdad, May 26 1917
Until quite recently I’ve been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil… Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women – if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other. Baghdad, March 14 1920
Have I ever told you what the river is like on a hot summer night? At dusk the mist hangs in long white bands over the water; the twilight fades and the lights of the town shine out on either bank, with the river, dark and smooth and full of mysterious reflections, like a road of triumph through the midst. Baghdad, September 11 1921
Harriet Tubman is one of the most inspiring and well-known figures in American history. Born into slavery, she escaped and made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the Underground Railroad. She was an extraordinary, brave woman who inspired many with her relentless drive to help other slaves to freedom.
Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom
