This issue's "Middle Level Learning" section presents two articles. The first is "Harriet Tubman: Emancipate Yourself!" (by Steven S. Lapham and Peter Hanes). "Argo," which won the 2012 Oscar for best picture, was about a daring escape of six U.S. diplomats from Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Now imagine the hero of that story returning to Iran time and again--rescuing captives with each furtive mission, ready to employ fanciful ruses each time to fool the suspicious enemy. Add miles of hiking through hostile territory in winter to some of these missions. If you perform that "mind experiment," then you begin to have an idea of the strength, courage, and achievement of a five-foot-tall African American woman: Harriet Tubman. Even then, you have considered only one method by which she resisted slavery (escape), one cause of several to which this American devoted her energy during her long life. In addition to being an Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist, Tubman was a U.S. Civil War Union Army nurse, scout and spy; women's suffragist; and humanitarian. In 2013, the 100th anniversary of Tubman's death, UNESCO and U.S. and Canadian government agencies (as well as civic organizations) are creating new resources to help the public learn more about Tubman and her era. Lapham and Hanes have relied on some of these resources in creating this issue of "Middle Level Learning." The second article in this section is "An 'Urgent Brief': Social Studies and Writing Skills" (by Thomas N. Turner, Jeremiah C. Clabough, and William Cole). Any writer will tell you that writing skills and talent are not static, but dynamic. Even mature authors hope to keep growing in clarity, originality, and eloquence. Educators and psychologists have studied children as they learn to write, and they all note that the process is developmental. For example, students can be observed progressing from recording facts in a sentence, to pairing ideas in "couplets," to organizing "couplet collections," and finally to composing complete paragraphs. If teachers help students put their skills to work regularly, students will produce increasingly complex and meaningful works, but for many, it is a difficult challenge.