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Benjamin Banneker and Us
- Eleven Generations of an American Family
- Narrated by: Rachel Jamison Webster
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative.
Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.
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Story
Thanks to her spiteful, jealous Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe was cut off from her Chinese father, Samuel, when she was just a baby, after he announced that he was taking a Chinese bride. By the time Nell was old enough to travel to her father's shop in St. Anne's Bay, he'd taken his family back to China, never learning what became of his eldest daughter. Bereft, Nell left Jamaica for New York to start a new life.
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Fascinating
- By ayodele higgs on 01-27-16
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Master Slave Husband Wife
- An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- By: Ilyon Woo
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
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Necessary story well told!
- By Marc W Rhoades on 01-19-23
By: Ilyon Woo
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On Juneteenth
- By: Annette Gordon-Reed
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
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A short but compelling combination of history and
- By BK on 05-18-21
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Lose Your Mother
- A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
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Outstanding!!
- By eric lewis on 02-19-24
By: Saidiya Hartman
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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Twelve Years a Slave
- By: Solomon Northup
- Narrated by: Stephen L. Vernon
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve Years a Slave is an account of actual events that took place in the life of Solomon Northup, during the pre-Civil War era of the 1840s. It follows the trials and tribulations of an educated African American man that was born into freedom and later kidnapped, taken away from his family, and forced into slavery.
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What a great book!!!
- By Andrew Robbin on 09-07-14
By: Solomon Northup
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Dreams of Africa in Alabama
- The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
- By: Sylviane A. Diouf
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.
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Should be required reading in all schools.
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-21
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Slaves in the Family
- By: Edward Ball
- Narrated by: Edward Ball
- Length: 20 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ball family hails from South Carolina - Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to 4,000 Black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves.
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Gives a good insight for moving forward today
- By Wendy Wood on 05-05-19
By: Edward Ball
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Life Beyond Measure
- Letters to My Great-Granddaughter
- By: Sidney Poitier
- Narrated by: Sidney Poitier
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Abridged
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Sidney Poitier is one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood. He has overcome enormous obstacles in extraordinary times and is a role model for many Americans because of his convictions, bravery, and grace. Poitier reflects on his amazing life in Life Beyond Measure, offering inspirational advice and personal stories in the form of extended letters to his great-granddaughter.
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Mix of family history and life advice.
- By Adam Shields on 10-31-19
By: Sidney Poitier
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Reclamation
- Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant's Search for Her Family's Lasting Legacy
- By: Gayle Jessup White
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors - both the enslaver and the enslaved.
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Slow start, eventually a worthwhile story
- By ChocolateDweller on 12-17-21
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- By: Frederick Douglass
- Narrated by: Walter Covell
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.
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Great Book!
- By Mama C on 03-05-11
What listeners say about Benjamin Banneker and Us
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Susannah H.
- 11-23-23
A unique story read by a beautiful storyteller
I loved this book so much. It’s part autobiographical, part non-fiction, part historical fiction, part poetic prose. What a wonderful way to tell a family’s journey through the centuries and across the landscapes of America.
You should read this book. It will warm your heart and inform your mind.
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