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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Rachel Jamison Webster, "Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family" (Henry Holt, 2023)
Description: 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.In Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Fam...