Lineage

In Lineage, Karin Wulf guides us through the early modern archive of genealogies-the stories and records kept by Kings and commoners, English, African and Indigenous peoples in the Atlantic world, and brings their enduring importance to light-an importance rooted in the connection between family and state interests or, as she so cogently puts it, between emotion and power. The result is a stunning work, beautifully written and meticulously researched, in which the multiple meanings of family are made exceptionally clear. This is a gorgeously rendered work of history that should be read by anyone interested in the American past. * Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic *
Karin Wulf has written an authoritative, engrossing history of an American characteristic - genealogy - and uncovered its surprisingly egalitarian role in the formation of the United States. Brisk, vivid, and brilliantly expansive, Lineage shows how Americans of all backgrounds - wealthy and poor, Black, Indigenous, and white, men and women - found themselves subject to the genealogical power of the state even as they embraced genealogy in their own families to claim its extraordinary cultural and legal authority in early America. Genealogy, Wulf reveals, was always more than a family affair. * William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War *
Karin Wulf's Lineage transforms mind-numbing and mostly forgotten books and artifacts into vibrant accounts of forgotten pasts. A Wampanoag account book, a lock of hair, a staine=glass window, a goat-leather-bound genealogy of a Stuart King, and reams of court records, diaries, letters, and plantation accounts affirm that "genealogy has never been, nor is it now, purely a matter of private interest. * Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth *
Karin Wulf brings together the personal and intimate motivations for genealogy with public record-keeping to tell a remarkable story about early America and the families that shaped it. Using information from families across all classes, races, religions, and regions, Wulf's illuminates the ways families and authority figures leveraged genealogy for personal and public goals. Lineage is a striking portrait of early America, highlighting the crucial role genealogy played in the machinations of familial, political, social, and economic power. * Amy Harris, author of Being Single in Georgian England *