Over the last year and a bit I’ve been researching, writing, presenting, revising, and publishing work that is related to but beyond my book on genealogy in early America. It’s been exciting– fun, even!– to keep working on issues and with materials that I continue to find compelling and important, and to put them into new contexts. Or, at times, to be able to pause and extend or deepen arguments that I’ve made in Lineage. (News about Lineage pub date and the cover–which I’m so, so pleased with, coming very soon!)
I can’t link to the publications in academic journals the way I do with public writings (almost all of which are found here). Most of them can be read for free at a library or via aggregators such as ProjectMUSE or JSTOR with the limited accounts they offer to readers who don’t have institutional subscriptions. But I did want to share a bit about what’s included in these pieces, and why I was excited to be writing them. Several more will be published in the coming year and I’ll do the same for those. For now, I’m highlighting a short review, a research article, and a review essay, published respectively in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Mormon History, and Reviews in American History.
The first, “Descendancies,” is part of a group of responses to the essays that make up the The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Part of the broader package of 1619 Project projects, created by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and including work by scholars and artists that first appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the book is an expansion of the ongoing work. Some of the original essays are expanded and there are new ones, and there are creative pieces too including poetry. In a forum, the American Historical Review invited a group of reviewers to coordinate by focusing on specific pieces within the volume–and included a response from the NYT Magazine’s editor who worked closely on the 1619 Project and its various initiatives, and book co-editor, Jake Silverstein. The resulting 1619 Project Forum is, in my view, very good reading. A reaction to the original project that got a lot of attention came from a handful of historians who objected to a specific phrasing–and some to the overall framing, but they focused on phrasing– about the relationship of the American Revolution to slavery. A fair piece by my colleague and friend Leslie Harris called attention to the need for the project to have better coordinated the review scholars offered of the project as it was development. There is no need to rehearse all this except to say that the book approached a form of peer review differently than the original publication. As a NYT reviewer noted, the book “added more than 1,000 endnotes, and in their acknowledgments [the editors] thank a roster of peer reviewers so long and distinguished as to make any writer of history envious.”
For the AHR forum, contributors were invited to select from among the book’s essays to review. The resulting essays are terrific, I think. Of course I was focused on the early American pieces. Annette Gordon-Reed reviewed an essay by historian Leslie Alexander and her sister, the attorney Michelle Alexander, about racialized law in America from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Rose Stremlau, Malinda Lowery, and Julie Reed wrote about the intwined histories of settler colonialism and racial slavery, and why the book (and project) kept them, as it were segregated.
My own piece focused on two of the 1619 Project pieces, an essay by historian Tiya Miles titled “Dispossession,” and “Inheritance” by journalist Trymaine Lee. For me, the key dynamic is and was politics wielded against family and families. In these two pieces, side by side, we se an early 19th century and early 20th century example of extraordinary violence waged against those families perceived in different historical moments and contexts as outsiders, and by those whose efforts to gain advantage for their own.
The Vanns and the Bollings were each working within systems that disadvantaged them in part by explicitly targeting their ability to build intergenerational stability. The United States was coercing Native Americans to give up collective claims to land in favor of individual ownership, the benefits of which were supposed to confer rights of inheritance. The Bollings were among the generation that inherited the Jim Crow policies that made ownership and inheri- tance nearly impossible. These should be opposing forces: to dispossess is to take away, typically via a government, and to inherit is to receive, typically from an ancestor. But they were unified as Native Americans and Black Americans experienced them, disempowering both.
KW, “Descendancies,” AHR December 2022, p. 1821
The second piece is an essay that came out of an invitation to speak to the Mormon History Association at their annual conference, in June 2023. Delivering the Smith-Pettit Lecture was an honor, and also an opportunity to extend some of the research that I’d done on Wilford Woodruff for my book’s epilogue. Woodruff is a fascinating figure, and, I argue, sits at the crossroads of American genealogy. He was the product of the long American investment in and infrastructure for genealogy, and he helped accelerate and institutionalize genealogy for Mormons– and thus, ultimately, for a much wider American and then global public. I’ve enjoyed hearing from folks who read the essay as published in the Journal of Mormon History.
In recent histories, Woodruff appears as one of the innovators of American genealogical practice, reflective of the increasing influence and impact of Mormons through the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. But he was equally and just as importantly an inheritor and adaptor of a long and deep tradition of British-American genealogy.
KW, “Wilford Woodruff at the Crossroads of American Genealogy,” Journal of Mormon History, April 2024, p. 25
The third is a review essay on two books, Francesca Morgan’s history of modern American genealogy and Susan Pearson’s of the birth certificate. I saw these as essentially connected (hi)stories, so had asked the editor if I could add Pearson’s to the review they commissioned of Morgan. These two books come together to show how powerfully both the state and private organizations collaborated to create the records systems and the practices that are the foundation of modern genealogy. Maybe this is no surprise because there is an important early American prehistory that I tell in Lineage. I appreciated both books, but I really appreciated them together. For me, Lemuel Shattuck, who shows up in each book (briefly in Morgan, more in Pearson) was the character who brings it all together:
I’m pretty sure he never gave him a thought, but if Michel Foucault had to imagine a character perfectly figured to design and implement a biopolitics of the new American state it would have been Lemuel Shattuck. Born in Massachusetts in 1793, Shattuck was a teacher, historian, and bookseller. He was also a founder of both the American Statistical Association (in 1839) and the
KW, “United States of Data: Genealogy and Technologies of Intimate Information in Modern America,” Reviews in American History 52 (2004), p. 1
New England Historic and Genealogical Society (in 1844). This twinned focus was the key: genealogy was the underlying logic of the systems of recordation that would allow for multiple public uses, including what Shattuck described as the public health interests in calculating birth and mortality rates from
family information.
I’m in the midst of several more research pieces which are in various stages of revision for publication. All extend Lineage in some fashion, all let me head back to the archives for more of the materials that have preoccupied me for some long. I’ll share bits and pieces as these move forward, but am glad to share for now at least a brief look at these three already out into the world.