Harriet Tubman for New $10 Note, Say Historians

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As U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew asks the public which famous woman he should put on new $10 bills, historians he’s surveyed privately are building a convincing argument for abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Catherine Clinton, a Tubman biographer, pressed her case at a meeting Lew held with more than a dozen academics and researchers in Washington in August. Together with other Tubman supporters, she swayed some of her colleagues, including Arwen Palmer Mohun, a history professor at the University of Delaware, in Newark.

“I walked into that meeting with a list in my head, but a pretty firm conviction that it should be a woman of color,” Mohun said in an interview. “And I walked out convinced that that woman should be Harriet Tubman.”