Abstract
Across the world and since antiquity, people have practiced genealogy—the study of lineage. Prior to the 1800s, genealogy’s most familiar incarnation in the Western world was as a monarchical and aristocratic practice. Indeed, premodern Europeans relied on lineage for the maintenance of social hierarchies. Genealogy constituted an ideology, a set of ideas or signs that expresses and reproduces social and other power relations.1
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Notes
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 105–30, esp. 107–09.
Anthony Molho et al., “Genealogy and Marriage Alliance: Memories of Power in Late Medieval Florence,”, Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living: Essays in Memory of David Herlihy, ed. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., and Steven A. Epstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 39–70.
David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996;repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–94.
Ideology “can also denote any significant conjuncture between discourse and political interests” (Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction [London and New York: Verso, 1991], 221).
My definition of the U.S. bourgeoisie starts with Sven Beckert’s, which focuses on an economic elite that “owned and invested capital, employed wage workers” (including servants), “did not work for wages themselves, and did not work manually.” See Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3, 6–7 (quotations).
Outside these processes, nineteenth-century Mormon communities were simultaneously reframing genealogy as a religious observance. James B. Allen, Jessie L. Embry, and Kahlile B. Mehr, Hearts Turned to the Fathers: A History of the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1894–1994 (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, Brigham Young University, 1995).
Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91–115, 206–11.
Richard Bushman with the assistance of Jed Woodworth, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 421–23, 425, 477–78.
Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, “Modern Heaven … and a Theology,”, Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion, ed. Eric A. Eliason (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 137–46.
Michael Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots: An Inquiry into American Genealogical Discourse” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2010).
Francesca Morgan, “A History of Genealogy in Mormon America” (presented at the 2006 meeting of the Mormon History Association, Casper, Wyo.).
On genealogy and the formation of national bourgeois communities, see Francesca Constance Morgan, “‘Home and Country’: Women, Nation, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890–1939” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998).
Amanda Laugesen, The Making of Public Historical Culture in the American West, 1880–1910: The Role of Historical Societies (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter [U.K.]: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
Both the Articles of Confederation (1777), Article 6, and the U.S. Constitution (1787), Article I, section 9, specifically outlawed titles of nobility (personal communication, Sven Beckert, October 20, 2009). See also Karin A. Wulf, “Representing the Family to the State; or, Lineage in a New Nation” (presented at the 2006 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, DC).
Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 281–316.
Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 4, 24–55.
Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996; repr. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131–32, 159–65, 206–57, 275–77.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975;repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 242–50.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 123–27, 135–59 (on European bourgeoisies’ adaptations of nobilities’ genealogical and sexual practices).
Here, the Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles was bemoaning President James Monroe’s interest in heraldry. “Ancestry and Heraldry,” Niles’ Weekly Register 13 (September 6, 1817): 18. See also H. (pseud.), “English Genealogy—Sunday,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 1, no. 4 (1821): 411–12. Numerous brief anecdotes also considered genealogy focused on noble descent to be un-American and/or to exemplify the sin of pride. See, for example, “Miscellaneous: Pride,” The Weekly Visitant: Moral, Poetical, Humorous, &c. 1 (June 28, 1806): 207; “Anecdotes,” Ladies’ Literary Cabinet, Being a Repository of Miscellaneous Literary Productions 2 (September 30, 1820): 166. Some modern-day scholars also stress the Early Republic’s repudiation of authority based on lineage: Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
John A. Schutz, A Noble Pursuit: The Sesquicentennial History of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1845–1995 (Boston: NEHGS, 1995).
Heraldry’s purposes have ranged far beyond signifying nobility. However, the form of heraldry that appealed most to nineteenth-century bourgeois “consists particularly in the appropriation of figurative representations, designed, by suitable emblems, to exhibit the achievements of valor, the descent of hereditary honors, and the distinctions appertaining to nobility” (“Heraldry,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 1 [July 1847]: 225, hereafter cited as NEHGR). Most who were interested in heraldry focused on trying to establish their descent from English families that had undergone “Visitations” by heralds during Henry VIII’s reign (1509–47) in the regime’s attempt “to better regulate the use of [family] arms” (David T. Thackery, “Back to Adam”: A Survey of Genealogy in the Western World, as Illustrated in the Collections of the Newberry Library [Chicago: Newberry Library, 1992], 13–14).
The National Archives dates only from 1932, and the Library of Congress (created in 1802) remained relatively small in the nineteenth century. Public libraries developed in antebellum New England and spread nationally starting in the 1870s, but they did not usually emphasize the collection of sources favored by genealogical researchers. To fill such vacuums, historical societies and, later, genealogical societies created libraries intended for use by members and, later, researchers who met their approval. See Leslie W. Dunlap, American Historical Societies, 1790–1860 (Madison, WI: privately printed, 1944), 4, 9.
Haynes McMullen, American Libraries before 1876 (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 37, 123, 130;
Hawthorne Daniel, Public Libraries for Everyone: The Growth and Development of Library Services in the United States (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 7–14;
Pamela Spence Richards, Scholars and Gentlemen: The Library of the New-York Historical Society, 1804–1982 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 7–8;
Louis Leonard Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791–1991 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1995; distributed by Boston: Northeastern University Press), 80–89; and Bulletin of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society 1 (December 1869): 4.
The nearly 500 surviving letters between the genealogist John Farmer and his colleagues vividly depict the logistical difficulties of performing genealogical and historical research in the 1820s and 1830s. John Farmer Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord (hereafter cited as Farmer Papers); Franccois Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 80 (September 2007): 425–26.
Francesca Morgan, “Lineage as Capital: Genealogy in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly 83 (June 2010): 250–262.
One historian remarked in 1835 that traditions “should be depended upon only as leading the investigator towards the truth, which, on further inquiry and comparison of different traditions with records, may be discovered” (Lemuel Shattuck, A History of Concord; Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from Its Earliest Settlement to 1832, and of the Adjoining Towns, Bedford, Acton, Lincoln, and Carlisle [Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company/Concord, MA: John Stacy, 1835], iv). See also Weil, “John Farmer,” 425–26.
Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II, 1822–1826, ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Merrell R. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 316, quoted in Cole, Mary Moody Emerson, 185.
Henry Lee Shattuck’s later career fulfilled his mother’s wishes for him. At a time when Massachusetts state politics were dominated by Irish Americans and largely shunned by his fellow Yankees, he resuscitated the nineteenth-century pattern of upper-class men’s holding of political office. John T. Galvin, The Gentleman Mr. Shattuck: A Biography of Henry Lee Shattuck, 1879–1971 (Boston: Tontine Press, 1996), 32, 46 (quotation).
Karin A. Wulf, “’Of the Old Stock’: Quakerism and Transatlantic Genealogies in Colonial British America,”, The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 304–20.
Wulf, “Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era,”, Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 14–19.
Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. 1, 6–16;
Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5–6, 133, 157–58, 205–09.
Ellen Tucker Emerson (1839–1909), daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcribed in 1861 “What I Can Remember of Stories of Our Ancestors Told Me by Aunt Mary Moody Emerson.” Cole, Mary Moody Emerson, 11–12, 298–99, 313.
Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 140.
Edward Jarvis, M.D., “The Supposed Decay of Families,” NEHGR 38 (October 1884): 387.
See also Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Creating Lineages,”, The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, ed. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston: NEHGS, 2002; distributed by Boston: Northeastern University Press), 5–6; and Maureen A. Taylor, “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: The Family Tree Lithograph in America,” in Simons and Benes, eds., The Art of Family, 76.
After the American Revolution exiled genealogy to the private sector, the first genealogical publication aimed an audience broader than the author’s own relatives was John Farmer’s A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New-England (Lancaster, MA: Carter, Andrews, 1829). See also Weil, “John Farmer,” 420–22, 428–30.
New-Hampshire Historical Society to Lemuel Shattuck, circular letter, June 9, 1831, Lemuel Shattuck Papers, MHS;Nash, First City, 207;Hampton L. Carson, A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Published by the Society under the Special Centennial Publication Fund, 1940), 1:xv, 45.
“Notices of Publications,” NEHGR 10 (January 1856): 93; “Book-Notices,” NEHGR 24 (January 1870): 95;W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 107–8.
New England’s first successful industrial mills, and the factory towns surrounding them, had been developed by merchants who continued in commerce even after the mills began to prosper. Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), 12, 61–63; Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 85–97.
In aiding Brown, Lawrence did not know about his plans for fostering slave insurrections in Virginia. Thomas H. O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 10–11, 14, 38–41, 46–47; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 164–224.
Richard H. Abbott, Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 22–27, 40.
Galvin, The Gentleman Mr. Shattuck, xiv, 18–20; Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 3 (January 1982): 40. At least one Boston-area Know Nothing, however, treasured his own Mayflower lineage and researched it at length;see Solomon Bradford Morse, genealogical notes, Records of the East Boston Chapter of the American Party, vols. 1–3, 4 (1853–1858), MHS. I thank Dean Grodzins for drawing my attention to this material.
“Ten Eyck Family Records,” Nygbr 1 (October 1870): 31–32; C. B. Moore, “Biography of Ezra L’Hommedieu,” Nygbr 2 (January 1871): 1–7; “Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in the City of New York,” Nygbr 6 (January 1875): 32–47 (and also in subsequent issues).
“Master Sullivan of Berwick—His Ancestors and Descendants,” NEHGR 19 (October 1865): 289–305, celebrated a powerful Irish family that had supported Catholic claimants to the English throne before taking refuge in Maine. I thank Mary Rhinelander McCarl for this reference. Annie Nathan Meyer (1867–1951), a physician’s wife who helped found Barnard College, was born into a Jewish family of documented colonial lineage. She belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. See Barbara Sicherman et al., eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), 473–74.
Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 179; Peter Dobkin Hall, “What the Merchants Did with Their Money: Charitable and Testamentary Trusts in Massachusetts, 1780–1880,”, Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, ed. Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997; distributed by Boston: Northeastern University Press), 399–400, 408; Rev. Increase N. Tarbox, D.D., “William Cogswell, D.D.,” NEHGR 37 (April 1883): 117–28; Schutz, Noble Pursuit, 53 (on Rev. Edmund Slafter’s Episcopalianism), 65.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
Harriet Ritvo, foreword, to Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. 2 (1868; repr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Works on the early eugenics movement include Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (Amherst, NY: Humanities Books, 1998), 27–48.
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995) 57–112
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13–15, 45–46.
Margaret E. Derry, Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing, 1800–1920 (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 14–20.
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, rev. ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1963).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1, 315–53.
Henry F. Waters, “Genealogical Gleanings in England,” NEHGR 37 (July 1883): 233–40, and in subsequent issues until 1899; “Notes and Queries,” NEHGR 37 (July 1883): 305–6.
Charles B. Moore in “Plan of Genealogical Work,” Nygbr 1 (April 1870): 9. Italics are his. The British Kennel Club issued the first known “public record book” for dogs in 1874. “Purebred” livestock are an older institution, dating from late-eighteenth-century England. Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (Kennel Club on 56).
Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 120–30.
Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 27–35, 207–12. I thank Susan Jennifer Pearson for directing me to this literature.
Eliphalet Wickes Blatchford (1826–1914) was a Chicago lead manufacturer and a family-history aficionado. As longtime chairman of the Newberry Library’s board of trustees, Blatchford oversaw the hiring of the Newberry’s first librarians and did much to shape the institution, including developing its commitment to genealogy. The Newberry Library originated as half of the $4 million estate of the railroad and real-estate magnate Walter Loomis Newberry (1804–1868). His nephew Walter C. Newberry (himself a library trustee) and other surviving relatives showed keen interest in colonial New England and English lineage. Galleys for Eliphalet Wickes Blatchford, comp., Blatchford Memorial II: A Genealogical Record of the Family of Rev. Samuel Blatchford, D.D. with Some Mention of Allied Families (privately printed, 1912), folder 997, box 14; Walter C. Newberry to E. W. Blatchford, February 24, 1908, folder 920, box 13;E. W. Blatchford Papers, Board of Trustees Personal Papers, 02/15/01, Newberry Library Archives, Newberry Library, Chicago.
See also Rick J. Ashton, “Curators, Hobbyists, and Historians: Ninety Years of Genealogy at the Newberry Library,” Library Quarterly 47 (April 1977): 149–62.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (1976;repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 35–36, 71–73, 98–99, 109.
John St. Paul Jr., The History of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution (New Orleans: Pelican, 1962), 1–6, 156.
Woden Sorrow Teachout, “Forging Memory: Hereditary Societies, Patriotism, and the American Past, 1876–1898” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2003), 19–51.
“Societies and Their Proceedings,” NEHGR 37 (October 1883): 411;Robert R. Davenport, ed., Hereditary Society Blue Book (Baltimore: Genealogical and Beverly Hills, CA: Eastwood, 1994), 31, 34.
The DAR became the largest, at 30,000 in 1900 and more than 100,000 a decade later; the SAR claimed fewer than 10,000 in 1900. In 1909, the Daughters of the Revolution counted just over 4,800 members. By the 1930s, the NSCDA numbered around 11,000. All other hereditary groups maintained memberships in the hundreds. Some Civil War commemoration organizations were also hereditary in character: the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1894), for the most part; the Sons of Confederate Veterans (1896); and the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic (1886). Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ Organizations and Hereditary Organizations in America, 17831900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 77.
Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 20, 66–69.
Mrs. Joseph Rucker Lamar (Clarinda Huntington Lamar), A History of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America from 1891 to 1933 (Atlanta: Walter W. Brown, 1934), 2.
Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 132–33.
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the General Society, Daughters of the Revolution (Englewood, NJ: Englewood Press, 1909), 22–23; Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America; Teachout, “Forging Memory”; Brundage, Southern Past, 12–54; Stuart McConnell, “Reading the Flag: A Reconsideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s,”, Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102–119; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 13–51; Davies, Patriotism on Parade; Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots.”.
On perceptions of self-made men, see in particular Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 81–188.
Morgan, “Lineage as Capital”; Donald Harman Akenson, Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 71–281.
Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001).
Morgan, “‘Home and Country,”’ 49–62; Henrietta Nesmith Greely (wife of General A. W. Greely) in “Proceedings of the Third Continental Congress,” American Monthly Magazine 4 (June 1894): 754; Remembrance Book of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Washington, DC: NSDAR, July 1918), 7–8.
Elizabeth Kimmick, comp. and ed., History of the New Mexico State Organization of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution (n.p., 1957), 14–15, 20–21.
Isabel Anderson, “The Growth and Development of Our Library,” Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 58 (April 1924): 212–13. SAR leaders in Lincoln, Nebraska, organized a chapter similarly, by recruiting the town’s “best men” and then performing genealogical research on their behalf. Correspondence by Clarence S. Paine and Edwin O. Halstead, 1913, folder 2, box 2, Series 1: Correspondence, Nebraska SAR.
David Levering Lewis, W E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 13, 374–75, 660 (note 66).Statutes of the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890 to 1897 (Washington, D.C.: NSDAR, n.d. [1897]), 7. The DAR scrapped this statute by 1977, when it admitted its first known African American member, Karen Batchelor Farmer of Detroit;see “DAR Accepts a Black Member,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 4, 1977, 22A. For other examples of Revolutionary lineages mapped by early twentieth-century African Americans, see “Here and There,” Colored American Magazine 2 (March 1901): 378–79; and “Social Uplift,” The Crisis 11 (November 1915): 8.
Historians emphasize that such sexual ideals existed amidst a multiplicity of other ideals, not to mention sexual practices, in the nineteenth-century United States. See, for example, John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 55–167.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). However, the censoring described above indicates that prohibitions on extramarital sexual activity were deeply felt in the staid circles in which genealogists moved.
Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper’s, 1956).
Alex Haley, Roots (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976).
David Chioni Moore, “Routes: Alex Haley’s Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy,” Transition no. 64 (1994): 4–21.
Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41;
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revivals in Post Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), esp. 1–18.
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Morgan, F. (2010). A Noble Pursuit?: Bourgeois America’s Uses of Lineage. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_9
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