A version of this article by Lauren Christensen appears in print on December 24, 2017, on Page 23 of the [New York Times] Sunday Book Review

illiterate: the story of Harriet Tubman’s hymnal

[Photo Credit: Michael R Barnes/Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture]

In 2010, a church hymnal that once belonged to Harriet Tubman — the American abolitionist hero who, after escaping slavery in 1849, devoted her new freedom to leading hundreds more of her fellow enslaved out of captivity, first as a conductor on the underground railroad and then later as a Union spy — was donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture by the collector and historian Charles L. Blockson.

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