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EVEN SUPERHEROES NEED A NETWORK

Harriet Tubman and the Rise of Insurgency in the New York State Underground Railroad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2009

Nicholas Maurice Young ,
Binod Sundararajan ,
Mary Liz Stewart  and
Paul Stewart
Binod Sundararajan
Affiliation:
School of Business Administration, Dalhousie University
Mary Liz Stewart
Affiliation:
Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region (URHPCR)
Paul Stewart
Affiliation:
Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region (URHPCR)
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Abstract

We analyze historical data to conduct an exploratory structural investigation into the process that Harriet Tubman used to free her family and friends as a member of the New York State Underground Railroad (UGRR). We suggest that she accomplished this feat because of her ability to rely on embedded (Granovetter 1985; Uzzi 1996) network contacts that allowed her to bridge structural holes (Burt 1992) and link with people with whom she was not previously linked (Lin et al., 2001). We conclude by discussing the importance of network analysis for providing empirical meaning to historical events and episodes.

Keywords

Harriet TubmanRaceNetworksUnderground RailroadSlavery
Type
STATE OF THE ART
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Fall 2009 , pp. 397 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2009

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