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tical men who saw the necessity for compromise and white support in order to advance both themselves and the interests of their constituencies. In the case of Doug- lass, Oakes tells us, the path to compromise was long and torturous. But Oakes's study is also a compelling illustration of how compromises can bring hitherto and seemingly irreconcilable leaders together. The effec- tiveness of leadership is defined often not by rigid ideo- logical posturing, but the ability to know when to com- promise, when concessions are necessary, and how to navigate delicately between competing interests and groups.

TUNDE ADELEKE

Iowa State University

MILTON C. SERNETT. Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2007. Pp. xi, 409. $24.95.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the subject of Harriet Tubman surged in popularity among scholars and biographers after decades of leaving her story to the realms of juvenile literature, secondary education textbooks, and popular culture. The year 2003 saw the publication of not one, but three critical biographies of Tubman, the first since 1943. Milton C. Sernett's book stands, among other things, as a refreshing example of scholarly generosity and collaborative spirit. Jean H. Humez, author oi Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (2003), joins Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Porirait of an American Hero (2003), in Sernett's acknowledge- ments as key intellectual influences who also shared with him sources and ideas.

Born into slavery sometime in the 1820s in Maryland, Tubman freed herself in 1849 and became a leading fig- ure of the abolitionist movement and enduring symbol of the Underground Railroad. She risked everything to return several times to the South to help free others and served as a nurse and Union scout during the Civil War. After the war, and for the rest of her long life, she strug- gled financially while continuing to work for racial and gender justice from her home in upstate New York until her death in 1913. Unlike Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington (who spoke at the dedication of a memorial tablet for Tubman in her adopted community of Auburn, New York, in 1914), Tubman was illiterate and so could not write a slave narrative or any subsequent autobiography. Similar to Sojourner Truth, she did tell her story often—to a bi- ographer, as a speaker for abolition and woman suf- frage, and in more intimate settings. Historians have accounts of these stories but nothing in Tubman's own hand. This has made her both harder to grasp as a his- torical figure and far easier to mythologize, which is where Sernett steps in.

Sernett's richly textured study is not foremost a bi- ography but an analysis of the interplay of individual and collective history-making, myth-making, and the cultural memories surrounding Tubman. His goal is

two-fold: to "recover" the historical Tubman from the dense thicket of legend that engulfs her, and to histori- cize the very processes of creating a legend. He de- scribes his study as "primarily about the remembered Tubman—that is about the myth that draws on the fac- tual core but is often in tension with it" (p. 3). Tracing the remembered woman through various incarnations, from "Minty" and "Black Moses" to "The General" and "Aunt Harriet," Sernett asks why Tubman's life and ac- tions have been narrated in particular ways over time by different people searching for a "usable past." In an- alyzing the uses to which her history and mythologies have been aimed, from black liberation and economic justice to women's rights and multiculturalism, Sernett reserves his strongest criticisms for feminist activists and scholars who sought first to link the living Tubman and then her memory, heroism, and stature to quests for women's liberation. His very timely book ends with the most recent chapter in the crafting of Tubman's story and the riches of 2003, examining, along with the works by Humez and Larson, Catherine Clinton's Har- riet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2003).

This is an impressively researched and fascinating book. Sernett considers a vast range of sources to peel back the many layers of "myth, memory, and history" around Tubman, including literature, history, biogra- phy, fine art, music, theater, film and television, mate- rial culture, and heritage tourism. He is clearly most at home analyzing and historicizing written texts, and at times leaves discussions of visual culture and popular materials less well developed. While those working in the areas of cultural memory and slavery, abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction will find it particularly valuable, Sernett's study ofthe many stories of Tubman makes significant contributions to deeper understand- ings of the place of memory in American history and political culture widely.

MiCKi MCELYA University of Connecticut

AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN, editor. The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers. Afterword by JOSEPH T. GLATTHAAR. (New Directions in Southern History.) Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2007. Pp. vi, 266. $40.00.

This book is among the latest entries in the substantial, still growing literature on the common soldier of the American Civil War. The literature began with two co- piously researched works by Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier ofthe Union (1952). Together they offered not just the first but seemingly the last word on the subject. His- torians did not really extend Wiley's explorations until the 1980s, when numerous important works emerged in quick succession, among them Michael Barton's Good- men: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (1981); Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (1987); and Reid

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2008