{"id":26944,"date":"2012-12-13T22:16:38","date_gmt":"2012-12-13T22:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26944"},"modified":"2015-11-29T18:39:27","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T18:39:27","slug":"family-trees-a-history-of-genealogy-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26944","title":{"rendered":"Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045835\" target=\"_blank\">Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\" target=\"_blank\">Harvard University Press<\/a><br \/>\nApril 2013<br \/>\n250 pages<br \/>\n5-1\/2 x 8-1\/4 inches<br \/>\nHardcover ISBN: 9780674045835<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ehess.fr\/cena\/membres\/weil_en.html\" target=\"_blank\">Fran\u00e7ois Weil<\/a><\/strong>, Chancellor and Professor of History; former president of the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales<br \/>\n<em>Universities of Paris<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045835\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/images\/jackets\/9780674045835-lg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through kinship ties. <strong>This long and varied history of Americans\u2019 search for identity illuminates the story of America itself, according to Fran\u00e7ois Weil, as fixations with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way in the twentieth century to an embrace of diverse ethnicity and heritage.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Seeking out one\u2019s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire. Genealogy developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. But over the next century, knowledge of one\u2019s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite \u201cAnglo-Saxons\u201d in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one\u2019s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Ancestry.com attracts over two million members with census records and ship manifests, while popular television shows depict celebrities exploring archives and submitting to DNA testing to learn the stories of their forebears. Further advances in genetics promise new insights as Americans continue their restless pursuit of past and place in an ever-changing world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America Harvard University Press April 2013 250 pages 5-1\/2 x 8-1\/4 inches Hardcover ISBN: 9780674045835 Fran\u00e7ois Weil, Chancellor and Professor of History; former president of the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales Universities of Paris The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,8,17,20],"tags":[13086,340],"class_list":["post-26944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","tag-francois-weil","tag-harvard-university-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44369,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26944\/revisions\/44369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}