
In Search of Our Roots
How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
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Narrated by:
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Dominic Hoffman
Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying Black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes 19 extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through US history and back to Africa.
Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American "people’s history" of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as Mae Jemison, Tom Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Linda Johnson Rice.
More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants.
©2008 Henry Louis Gates (P)2008 Books on TapeListeners also enjoyed...




















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I recommend this book highly
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Great for history buffs
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I didn't even know that it was illegal to bring slaves here after 1808 and that most of them arrived by then. I didn't know that some indian tribes bought slaves or that some slaves were indian or that many African Americans today think that they have indian ancestry when they don't. Normally I associate how long you've been in this country with status ie. "His ancestors can be tracked back to the Mayflower". But every family with a former slave ancestor has been in this country far longer than my ancestors. For some reason I don't think that most white people (like me), sometimes even the same ones that criticize immigration, realize that many African Americans are more American then they are.
On the criticism side - I think the book is sometimes misleading. because it makes it sometimes seem that haplotypes define tribe and African ancestry. Haplotypes describe 2 of the subjects' ancestors out of maybe 1000 that long ago. But its nice to have detailed information on 2.
There's a lot of history when it pops up in someone's genealogy but I feel that it would be useful to have a section on the history of the slave trade on its own.
It was also really interesting to know the personal histories of the people who's ancestries are being studied and it made me wonder what my people would say about me some day down the road.
You need to know
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loved it
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Amazing
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Fascinating stories and lessons for genealogy research
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