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This book documents an amazing woman's struggle to end American slavery.
Harriet Tubman was born in Maryland, a slave because her mother was a slave. Her father was a free black man. Harriet defied slavery early when, in her teens, she tried to help another slave escape his master. Wounded in the head in that incident, Harriet suffered lifelong unpredictable seizures of sleep. Despite this problem, around age 29, she escaped north to Pennsylvania.
Illiterate, poor, but always immensely resourceful, Harriet returned to Maryland repeatedly in the 1850s to lead scores of other slaves north along the Underground Railroad. In the North she also befriended abolitionist John Brown and campaigned widely against slavery.
Harriet was an unpaid spy, nurse, and organizer of escaped slaves in South Carolina during the Civil War. In later years she acquired a small farm and established a modest home for aged, destitute blacks around Auburn, New York.
There may be no more heroic, historically revealing, and amazing life of the 19th century than that of Harriet Tubman.
Guided Reading Level: L
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