Francesca Morgan, "A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History" (UNC Press, 2021)

New Books in African American Studies · Mar 25, 2022 · 1h 19m

In A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), historian Francesca Morgan tracks Americans’ obsession with tracing family ancestry. Morgan sheds light on the evolution of genealogical knowledge from the early republic to the present day. Although our New Books Network conversation concentrates on African Americans, in her text, she looks explicitly at how Anglo-American white, Mormon, Jewish, African American, and Native American people wrestled with locating and documenting their kin and ultimately shaped the…