Who are we, and where do we come from? The fundamental drive to answer these questions is at the heart of Finding Your Roots, the companion book to the hit PBS documentary series. As scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. clearly demonstrates, the tools of cutting-edge genomics and deep genealogical research now allow us to learn more about our roots and look further back in time than ever before. In the second season, Gates's investigation takes on the personal and genealogical histories of more than twenty luminaries, including Ken Burns, Stephen King, Derek Jeter, Governor Deval Patrick, Valerie Jarrett, and Sally Field. As Gates interlaces these moving stories of immigration, assimilation, strife, and success, he provides practical information for amateur genealogists just beginning archival research on their own families' roots and details the advances in genetic research now available to the public. The result is an illuminating exploration of who we are, how we lost track of our roots, and how we can find them again.

In Roots Quest, sociologist Jackie Hogan digs into our current genealogy boom to ask why we are so interested in our family history. She shows how the surging popularity of genealogy is a response to large-scale social changes, and she explores the way our increasingly rootless society fuels the quest for an elemental sense of belonging—for roots.

This wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection—the first of its kind—invites us to reconsider the politics and scope of the Roots phenomenon of the 1970s. Alex Haley’s 1976 book was a publishing sensation, selling over a million copies in its first year and winning a National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. The 1977 television adaptation was more than a blockbuster miniseries—it was a galvanizing national event, drawing a record-shattering viewership, earning thirty-eight Emmy nominations, and changing overnight the discourse on race, civil rights, and slavery. These essays—from emerging and established scholars in history, sociology, film, and media studies—interrogate Roots, assessing the ways that the book and its dramatization recast representations of slavery, labor, and the black family; reflected on the promise of freedom and civil rights; and engaged discourses of race, gender, violence, and power in the United States and abroad. Taken together, the essays ask us to reconsider the limitations and possibilities of this work, which, although dogged by controversy, must be understood as one of the most extraordinary media events of the late twentieth century, a cultural touchstone of enduring significance. Contributors: Norvella P. Carter, Warren Chalklen, Elise Chatelain, Robert K. Chester, Clare Corbould, C. Richard King, David J. Leonard, Delia Mellis, Francesca Morgan, Tyler D. Parry, Martin Stollery, Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, Bhekuyise Zungu

Double Helix History examines the interface between genetics and history in order to investigate the plausibility of ‘new’ knowledge derived from scientific methods and to reflect upon what it might mean for the practice of history. Since the mapping of the human genome in 2001, there has been an expansion in the use of genetic information for historical investigation. Geneticists are confident that this has changed the way we know the past. This book considers the practicalities and implications of this seemingly new way of understanding the human past using genetics. It provides the first sustained engagement with these so-called ‘genomic histories’. The book investigates the ways that genetic awareness and practice is seemingly changing historical practice and conceptualisation. Linking six concepts – ‘Public’, ‘Practice’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Politics’, ‘Self’, and ‘Imagination – Double Helix History outlines the ways that genetic information, being postgenomic, the public life of DNA, and the genetic historical imaginary work on the body, on collective memory, on the historical imagination, on the ethics of historical investigation, on the articulation of history, and on the collection and interpretation of data regarding the ‘past’. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike interested in DNA, genetics, and historiography.

In recent years, the media has attributed the increasing numbers of people producing family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of Internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. A spate of new genealogy-themed television series and Internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have now emerged, capitIn recent years, the media have attributed the increasing numbers of people producing family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of Internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. A spate of new genealogy-themed television series and Internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have now emerged, capitalizing on the mapping of the human genome in 2003. This genealogical trend poses a need for critical analysis, particularly along lines of race and ethnicity. In contextual ways, as she intersperses an account of her own journey chronicling her Italian and Italian American family history, Christine Scodari lays out how family historians can understand intersections involving race and/or ethnicity and other identities inflecting families. Through engagement in and with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television series Roots, Ancestry.com, and Henry Louis Gates’s documentaries, Scodari also explains how to interpret their import to historical and ongoing relations of power beyond the family. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality gesture toward making connections not only between and among identities, but also between localized findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given current tools, texts, practices, cultural contexts, and technologies, Scodari’s study determines whether a critical genealogy around race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities is viable. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own genealogy, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger, cross-cultural contexts. There is little research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity. Thus, Scodari blends cultural studies, critical media studies, and her own genealogy as a critical pursuit to interrogate issues bound up in the nuts-and-bolts of engaging in family history.alizing on the mapping of the human genome in 2003. This genealogical trend poses a need for critical analysis, particularly along lines of race and ethnicity. In contextual ways, Christine Scodari lays out how family historians can understand intersections involving race and/or ethnicity within families. Through engagement in and with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television series Roots, Ancestry.com, and Henry Louis Gates’ documentaries, Scodari also explains how to decipher their import to historical and ongoing relations of power beyond the family. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality gesture toward making connections not only between and among identities, but also between localized findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given current tools, texts, practices, cultural contexts, and technologies, Scodari’s study determines whether a critical genealogy around race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities is viable. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own genealogy, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger, cross-cultural contexts. There is little research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity. Thus, Scodari blends cultural studies, critical media studies, and her own genealogy as a critical pursuit to interrogate issues bound up in the nuts-and-bolts of engaging in family history.

"A revolutionary, psychology-based guidebook for developing resilience and grit to confront our whitewashed history and build a better, more just future"--

Mankind has always had a special interest in the past, especially family history. If you always wondered about your past, where certain family traits originated, or whether those stories about a royal line are true, you are not alone. Millions have begun searching their roots to answer these questions and more. Internet technology and DNA testing have provided new tools to help locate those long-lost ancestors and to document information uncovered. The challenge is finding the right documents and compiling a well sourced family tree. This guide will get you started in the right direction with proven techniques developed over many years. Methods to organize and document your research. Census records, vital records, immigration and naturalization records. DNA and internet resources. Methods to publish your family history project. These will all be covered in detail.

We regard genocidal violence as worse than other sorts of violence—perhaps the worst there is. But what does this say about what we value about the genos on which nations are said to be founded? This is an urgent question for democracies. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those who have been and those who might yet be. If the genos is a group constituted by this generational time, the demos was invented as the anti-genos, with no criterion of inheritance and instead only occurring according to the interruption of revolutionary time. Insofar as the demos persists, we experience it as a sort of genos, for example, the democratic nation state. As a result, democracies are caught is a bind, disavowing genos-thinking while cherishing the temporal forms of genos-life; they abhor genocidal violence but perpetuate and disguise it. This is the genocide paradox. O’Byrne traces the problem through our commitment to existential categories from Aristotle to the life taxonomies of Linneaus and Darwin, through anthropologies of kinship that tether us to the social world, the shortfalls of ethical theory, into the history of democratic theory and the defensive tactics used by real existing democracies when it came to defining genocide for the U.N. Genocide Convention. She argues that, although models of democracy all make room for contestation, they fail to grasp its generational structure or acknowledge the generational content of our lives. They cultivate ignorance of the contingency and precarity of the relations that create and sustain us. The danger of doing so is immense. It leaves us unprepared for confronting democracy’s deficits and its struggle to entertain multiple temporalities. In addition, it leaves us unprepared for understanding the relation between demos and violence, and the ability of good enough citizens to tolerate the slow-burning destruction of marginalized peoples. What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

Now in a fully revised and updated edition, this engaging text provides a concise history of Korea from the beginning of human settlement in the region through the late nineteenth century. All readers looking for a balanced, knowledgeable history will be richly rewarded with this clear and concise book.

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance—moral, ethical, political—of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology.