Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (BA, ’92) has received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford UP, 2024). The committee for the prestigious award lauded Combee as a “richly-textured and revelatory account of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day, weaving military strategy and family history with the transition from bondage to freedom.” Combee also won the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, given annually to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era. The Pulitzer Prize in History was shared this year with Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal (UNC).

Fields-Black received a BA from Emory College in 1992 and is now Professor and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Read an excerpt from an interview with Fields-Black below and a feature article about the award: “Carnegie Mellon Professor Wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History.”

“In 2025, it is hard for Americans to fathom Harriet Tubman’s courage and selflessness, going back into what I call the “Prison House of Bondage” so many times to rescue family, friends and members of her community on the Maryland Eastern shore when she could have led a relatively comfortable life as a free woman in Philadelphia, St. Catherines, Canada or Auburn, New York. Then, during the Civil War, she risked her freedom and her life to go down to Beaufort, South Carolina, and rescue enslaved people she did not know, and (as she told to her biographers) whose dialect and culture she could not understand. Risking her freedom and her life so that other enslaved people could be free was a supreme act of bravery.“