Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross; c. March 1822 – March 10, 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.

As a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten by various masters to whom she was hired out. Early in her life, she suffered a head wound when hit by a heavy metal weight. The injury caused disabling seizures, narcoleptic attacks, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, which occurred throughout her entire life. A devout Christian, Tubman ascribed the visions and vivid dreams to revelations from God.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenge. Large rewards were offered for the return of many of the fugitive slaves, but no one then knew that Tubman was the one helping them. When the Southern-dominated Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, requiring law officials in free states to aid efforts to recapture slaves, she helped guide fugitives farther north into Canada, where slavery was prohibited.

When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves in South Carolina. After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She became active in the women's suffrage movement in New York until illness overtook her. Near the end of her life, she lived in a home for elderly African-Americans which she had helped found years earlier.

Legacy

Harriet Tubman, widely known and well-respected while she was alive, became an American icon in the years after she died. A survey at the end of the twentieth century named her as one of the most famous civilians in American history before the Civil War, third only to Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum.

When she died, Tubman was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn. The city commemorated her life with a plaque on the courthouse. Although it showed pride for her many achievements, its use of dialect ("I nebber run my train off de track") – apparently chosen for its authenticity – has been criticized for undermining her stature as an American patriot and dedicated humanitarian. Still, the dedication ceremony was a powerful tribute to her memory, and Booker T. Washington delivered the keynote address. The Harriet Tubman home was abandoned after 1920, but was later renovated by the AME Zion Church. Today, it welcomes visitors as a museum and education center.

Bradford's biographies were followed by Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist. Conrad had experienced a great difficulty in finding a publisher – the search took four years – and endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children – and many more came later – but Conrad wrote in an academic style to document the historical importance of her work for scholars and the nation's memory. The book was finally published by Carter G. Woodson's Associated Publishers in 1942. Despite her popularity and significance, another Tubman biography for adults did not appear for sixty years, until Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003, and Larson and Clinton both published their biographies in 2004.

Tubman was celebrated in many other ways throughout the nation in the twentieth century. Dozens of schools were named in her honor, and both the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn and the Harriet Tubman Museum in Cambridge serve as monuments to her life. In 1937 the gravestone for Harriet Tubman Davis was erected by the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the SS Harriet Tubman, its first Liberty ship ever named for a black woman. In 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in honor of Tubman as the first in a series honoring African Americans. She is commemorated together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Sojourner Truth in the calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church on July 20. In 1999, the Canadian government designated the Salem Chapel, British Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Catharines as a National Historic Site of Canada due to its association with Tubman. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Harriet Tubman on his list of the 100 Greatest African Americans. In 2008, Towson University named Tubman House, a new residence hall in the campus' West Village development, after Tubman.

AME Zion Church, illness, and death

At the turn of the 20th century, Tubman became heavily involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn. In 1903, she donated a parcel of real estate she owned to the church, under the instruction that it be made into a home for "aged and indigent colored people. The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a one-hundred-dollar entrance fee. She said: "They make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all. She was frustrated by the new rule, but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.

As Tubman aged, the sleeping spells and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed, and in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable. She had received no anesthesia for the procedure, and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

African Americans are trying to search their Irish roots inspired by Barack Obama

Barack Obama was only a year old when John F. Kennedy, America's first Catholic president, landed in Dublin airport in the summer of 1963. The first official visit to Ireland from a US president, Kennedy was met by throngs of jubilant Irish men and women as he returned to his ancestral homeland 114 years after his great-grandfather fled famine and set off for America. Local policemen adorned in their best uniform - those without the latest issue weren't allowed near the presidential route – lined the streets, vainly attempting to push back the bustling crowds who excitedly greeted the leader of the free world. A photographer was brought to tears as Kennedy joined a choir of 300 boys as they sang ‘The Boys of Wexford', a ballad celebrating the Irish rebellion against British rule in 1798. Declaring Ireland to be the country closest to his heart, Kennedy would end his successful four-day visit a heroic figure to the Irish people, his visit etched in the fond memories of the republic.

About half of the people we spoke to were descended from slave owners and half from poor Irish immigrants.’

In 1850 Falmouth Kearney, the 19-year-old son of a shoemaker, left the Irish town of Moneygall for America, where he married Charlotte Holloway from Ohio. He was Mr Obama’s great-great-great-grandfather.

Barack Obam-aarrgh! The young 'Barry' dressed up as a pirate when he lived with his grandparents in Hawaii

Today, it would be difficult to find a more unlikely Barack Obama cheerleader than Jane de Montmorency Wright. The 75-year-old former Montessori supervisor, who worked in the school founded by Diane Guggenheim, has a long aristocratic lineage.

Her uncle, Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency, was governor of the Punjab from 1928 to 1933. At one point, the family owned a 4,800 acre estate including a mansion.

And, yet, Mrs Wright is Barack Obama’s cousin, well, sixth cousin, three times removed. That makes her his closest living Irish relative.

next generation of the family had to look abroad for work. Tom Kearney – the son of Joseph Jnr – emigrated to Ohio where he worked as a carpenter. His brother, William, remained at home and became a shoemaker, providing for the residents of Moneygall and Roscrea. He and his wife had two sons.

William named the eldest Joseph after his own father, and the younger Francis. Joseph followed his father into the family business and, in 1825, he married 21-year-old Phebe Donovan, a farmer’s daughter from Ballygurteen. They had a son, Falmouth, and a daughter, Margaret.

Francis, meanwhile, had joined his uncle Tom in Ohio, where he found himself a farm in the Appalachian Mountains in Pickaway County. But Francis’s life in Ohio was tragically short. He died, aged 44, in January 1848. In his will, he left his elder brother the farm.

Joseph Kearney sold off his family’s interests in Moneygall to raise the fare for his passage. Sailing from Liverpool on the Caroline Read, he arrived in America on April 25, 1849.

The following year, he was joined by his 25-year-old son Falmouth Carney and his daughter Margaret and her husband William Cleary. Falmuouth had also been working as a shoemaker in Moneygall. This trio also made their way directly to Ohio.

And so the Kearneys re-established themselves as farmers in Ross County, Ohio.

In 1852, Falmouth was married to Charlotte Holloway. Their great-grandson, Stanley Armour Dunham, was Barack Obama’s grandfather. Stanley, who passed in just 1992, apparently went by the name ‘Dunham Kearney’ in his younger years.

It’s a complicated history, but today the ancestors of a wigmaker called Michael Kearney can still be found on both sides of the Atlantic. In Moneygall there’s Henry Healy. In Bennettsbridge there’s Jane de Montmorency Wright.

And, of course, in the White House there’s Barack Obama.

National news

Democratic Leader Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, on Wednesday blamed most of President Barack Obama's political problems on racism.

Clyburn, who's from South Carolina and is a close ally of the president, offered his views in response to a question about Obama's re-election prospects next year.

"I think they're improving every day," Clyburn said. "I think the president has been a good president, a great commander in chief."

Clyburn, who met his wife at a 1960 court hearing after spending a night in jail for having engaged in a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, S.C., then brought up Obama's race as the first black president.

"You know, I'm 70 years old," he said. "And I can tell you; people don't like to deal with it, but the fact of the matter is, the president's problems are in large measure because of the color of his skin."

Clyburn noted that he himself gets hate mail, racist phone calls and offensive faxes on a regular basis. Asked how that relates to the president, Clyburn retorted: "We have the same skin color; that's how it relates to him.

Vitamins linked to autism • Women who reported not taking prenatal vitamins immediately before and during a pregnancy were twice as likely to have a child with autism, University of California at Davis researchers reported Wednesday. If the women also had a mutation in a high-risk gene, they were seven times as likely to have a child with the developmental disorder, the researchers reported in the online edition of the journal Epidemiology.

House wants to bar abortion teaching • The House has passed legislation that would bar teaching health centers that receive federal funds under the new health care act from using the money to teach abortion techniques. Rep. Virginia Foxx, the sponsor of the measure, says she wants to make it "crystal clear" that taxpayer money is not being used to train health care providers to perform abortions.

Soldier sentenced • A U.S. soldier with mental health problems has been sentenced to 12½ years in military prison after pleading guilty of killing a suspected Taliban prisoner in his jail cell. Pfc. David Lawrence pleaded guilty of premeditated murder in a military court at Fort Carson in Colorado Wednesday.
Angle won't run • Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle said that she will not be a candidate in the September race to fill a vacant congressional seat in Nevada.
Liu drops bid • Goodwin Liu is withdrawing his nomination to an appeals court judgeship after Senate Republicans blocked a vote on his confirmation last week.