Every American seems to know the name and even story of Harriet Tubman. But do they? In spite of her stature and importance in American history, she seemed to have been ignored during much of the 20th century. In 2003 and 2004, six decades after the last major study of her life and times was published, readers got not one but two biographies: Catherine Clinton’s Harriet Tubman and Kate Clifford Larson’s Bound for the Promised Land.

Since then there have been countless children’s books and several shorter books on Tubman, or books that examine particular episodes in her life. But these these three groundbreaking books have remained the staples for anyone who wants to know more about one of the most famous Americans in history. However, three books, or even dozens, cannot truly convey the formidable person that Tubman was or the radical and emancipatory times she lived in. Our heroes require constant revision—especially one who had such a long and eventful life: Tubman lived to be in her 90s, and during her lifetime she worked to dismantle slavery, served courageously during the Civil War, advocated for women’s suffrage and equality, and cared deeply for the poor and marginalized.

Now the award-winning historian Tiya Miles has made Tubman the subject of her ninth book, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Miles’s biography is timely for a number of reasons. First, this is an election year, and nothing compels Americans to rethink the past like a presidential election. But more important, her new book fits within a larger turn among historians trying to move biography beyond the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative. In biographies on everyone from Merze Tate and Mollie Moon to Shirley Chisholm, scholars like Barbara D. Savage, Tanisha C. Ford, and Anastasia C. Curwood have sought to expand the scope of their narratives, extending them well beyond the life of a single person to consider the larger social worlds that shaped them and that they, in turn, helped to shape.

Night Flyer is unusual in another way, too. Tubman was not literate. She left no papers or diaries that could give us a fuller picture of her inner life, ideas, and experiences. Accordingly, all of her biographers have had to do careful and creative work to find the meaning in the silences often dismissed by their field. The discipline of history privileges the literate and the archival, which makes it easy for enslaved women to be marginalized even within their own stories. In Night Flyer, Miles illustrates what deft scholars can do to recover these stories.

For example, in Night Flyer, Miles shows us how, along with being an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a Civil War hero, Tubman was “arguably the most famous black woman ecologist in US history.” Miles understands Tubman as a woman who had meaningful connections to and deep knowledge of her environment and its surrounding natural habitats. She valued the complexity and utility of plants, animals, trees, soil, and the stars. The picture of Tubman as an illiterate woman often prevents people from seeing her skillfulness, intelligence, and wit. In Miles’s rendering, Tubman was also a spiritual woman, one who did not separate her religious beliefs from the natural world. Tubman’s story is one of faith and how God used nature to instruct her. The material and divine worlds were not mutually exclusive for Tubman. Today we separate faith from science, the heavens from the earth. But nature reinforced Tubman’s ideas about faith. In her view, God created the world and everything in it.

For this reason, it is impossible to write about Tubman and not discuss her faith. She earned the moniker “Moses” for leading her people out of the wilderness of slavery, but she was like Moses in another sense, too: She believed she lived in a world in which nature and God were not in conflict. Miles challenges the reader to take this faith seriously. She also contends that the public has too often reduced Tubman to an almost mythical hero or magician: Somehow, she mysteriously saves the day, avoids capture, and defies belief. Tubman was not subhuman, as slaveholders claimed, but labeling her as superhuman is also a denial of her humanity. Even physically, Tubman is stuck in a one-dimensional portrait that has her shrouded in scarves, bonnets, or shawls with no hint of a smile. Her features have often been described in a way that renders her exotic. Her 19th-century biographer Sarah Bradford described her as “the black woman from the Southern states only two [generations removed] from an African savage!” Bradford was a white woman from New York who was known for writing children’s literature before she published two of Tubman’s first biographies, and she undoubtedly used some of the same colorful, outlandish (and, by today’s standards, racist) language she used in her children’s books to chronicle Tubman’s life. But I was disappointed (and also somewhat shocked) to learn that even W.E.B. Du Bois described Tubman as a “full blooded African” and a “dark ghost” and wrote of her “wild, half-mystic ways with dreams, rhapsodies and trances.” It appeared as though no one could capture the authenticity of Tubman.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Delaware around 1822 as Araminta “Minty” Ross, a second- generation African American. Her grandmother, Modesty, had survived the Middle Passage. Her parents, Harriet “Rit” Green and Benjamin “Ben” Ross, had nine children. Her early years were lived under the constant threat of the family’s separation. In fact, several times during Tubman’s childhood she was taken away from the care of her parents and put in charge of caring for other children or assigned to do other work, as early as age 7. Her siblings were eventually sold away from her, and violence was a constant plague in her life.

Indeed, Tubman was still an adolescent when she suffered a traumatic brain injury: An overseer threw a two-pound weight at another enslaved person but hit her instead. The massive injury caused her to have blackouts, headachess, and chronic pain. Against the odds, she managed to survive and even to find love: Around 1844, Minty Ross married a free Black man named John Tubman. It was likely then that she adopted the names “Harriet” and “Tubman.” But her marriage was complicated, mainly because she was still enslaved, and few such marriages could withstand the auction block. In the fall of 1849, when Tubman feared that she would be sold, she decided to run away with her brothers. She made it to Pennsylvania and, for the first time, freedom.

Freedom empowered Tubman, and she used that power to free others. She began making trips back and forth between the slaveholding South and the free North using the stars as her guide, along with her deep knowledge of the landscape and her overall grit and determination. Her actions in leading other enslaved people to freedom—many of whom were her family members or friends—soon brought her to the attention of the abolitionist movement. She earned the nickname “Moses” and would go on to play a vital role in the Underground Railroad. Tubman used the weather to her advantage: Cold winters and snow made travel difficult, but it also minimized the chances of being taken by slave catchers.

When the Civil War broke out, Tubman put herself on the front lines as a spy and a nurse. She was most famous for the Combahee River Raid of 1863, in which she helped guide three steamboats loaded with Black Union soldiers who would liberate nearly 800 enslaved people. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Tubman carried on the great cause of freedom—but now not just for Black Americans but for women of all backgrounds. She rallied behind the cause of female suffrage, as well as care for the elderly and those who suffered from poverty. Tubman herself remained penniless for the greater part of her life.