Benjamin Banneker and Us
Eleven Generations of an American Family
by Rachel Jamison Webster
Pub Date 21 Mar 2023
Henry Holt & Company, Henry Holt and Co.
Biographies & Memoirs
I have been provided with a copy of Benjamin Banneker and Us by Henry Holt and Co and Netgalley for review:
As relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time at a family reunion, the past and present engage in an unforgettable genealogical journey.
Benjamin Banneker was a Black mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation hired by Thomas Jefferson to help survey Washington, DC in 1791. He then wrote what would become a famous letter, imploring Jefferson to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, discovers that her distant relative is this groundbreaking Black forefather.
By drawing on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins, Webster tells the story of the lives of their shared ancestors over a period of eleven generations, including Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who married when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. A number of these stories shed light on the legal construction of race and demonstrate the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in force today.
I give Benjamin Banneker and Us five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment