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So too is historian Milton Sernett, whose exceptionally well-researched "Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History" underscores Tubman's durability, pliability, resilience and symbolic importance. Following historian David W. Blight, who termed her "a malleable icon of America's antislavery past," Sernett sorts fact from fiction in Tubman's image in the popular imagination. "By learning of Harriet Tubman and her place in the American memory," Sernett concludes, "we learn about ourselves as the American people."

White and black abolitionists and reformers, including the famous ex-slave herself, carefully crafted Tubman's persona. "When various groups with causes of their own to advance needed a symbolic figure to represent the great struggle for freedom that eventually brought on the Civil War and then victory for the old abolitionist crusade," Sernett explains, "she was there to tell her story." "Harriet Tubman," he adds, "could be whatever an author wanted her to be, or needed her to be." Reality and mythology commonly intertwine for "Tubman pilgrims" engaged in "Tubman tourism."

Sernett succeeds admirably in exposing "the heroic and heavily mediated" Tubman. Exaggerated claims include that a master whipped her at age 5 for failing to keep a baby quiet, that at age 7 she ran away to avoid punishment for stealing a lump of sugar and that as a child she performed the unpleasant task of breaking flax.

Drawing upon Humez and Larson, Sernett sets the record straight regarding Tubman's rescue missions. Instead of 19 trips and 300 rescued bondsmen, she probably made 13 Southern forays, freeing probably 70 or 80 slaves and possibly assisting 60 others to escape. Other blacks also "risked their lives to bring out freedom seekers by doing as Tubman did." And Sernett notes that "Tubman's contributions to the suffrage and women's rights movements were more symbolic than substantial."

Sernett nevertheless does not diminish Tubman's importance. Her courage, self-sacrifice and strength remind us of the active role African-Americans played in their own emancipation and of the uses and abuses of history.

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