“Where others saw shut doors and unscalable brick walls, she dreamed into being tunnels and ladders,” the historian Tiya Miles writes in “Night Flyer,” a short biography of Tubman that is the first in a new series, called Significations and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., about notable Black figures. For decades after her death in 1913, Tubman’s extraordinary life was mostly relegated to books for children and young adults. Thorough, probing biographies by the historians Catherine Clinton and Kate Clifford Larson were published two decades ago. More recently, Tubman was the subject of a Hollywood biopic and “She Came to Slay,” an illustrated volume by the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, featuring a drawing of a pistol-toting Tubman on the cover. Perhaps inevitably, all the pop-cultural attention has been double-edged, commemorating Tubman’s formidable accomplishments while also making it harder to discern who she actually was.

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Persons: Harriet Tubman, Tiya Miles Harriet Tubman, —, Tubman, Mason, Dixon, Tubman’s, Tiya Miles, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Catherine Clinton, Kate Clifford Larson, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, toting Tubman, Miles, Tubman “, “ resizes Tubman Organizations: Underground Railroad Locations: Canada, Chesapeake, Maryland, Pennsylvania