Faces of America : How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts

Based on the PBS television series Faces of America hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.As a nation of immigrants, the American experience is vibrantly defined by the diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage of its people. Americans carve out their personal histories by tracing genealogies, combing through family archives, and mining the stories and family trees of their elders. But how far back into your past can you actually go? If you could look even four hundred years into your genetic history, what would that really look like?Since 2006, scholar and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been helping African Americans find long-buried details of their ancestries by analyzing their DNA and then marrying that information to a wealth of historical data. Global in scope,Faces of Americawill look outside the Black experience to explore the roots and identities of twelve of America's most recognizable and extraordinary citizens, who are of Asian, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Syrian, West Indian, and Native American ancestry: Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert, writer Louise Erdrich, writer Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, cellist Yo Yo Ma, writer and director Mike Nichols, former monarch of Jordan Queen Noor, surgeon and author Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi.Each of the celebrity subjects inFaces of Americaunderwent dense genotyping to trace their father's line, mother's line, and their percentages of European, Asian, Native American, and African ancestry. Gates and his father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., also took part, making medical history in the process as they both had their entire genomessix billion base pairssequenced and analyzed by geneticists at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Medical School.Faces of Americaunfolds as a rollicking journey into the ancestral past. Readers will share in the surprise, delight, shock and profound education of the subjects themselves as their rich family stories, traced back to their arrival on Americas shores, and beyond, deep into the history of their countries of origin, are revealed. America, as Gates shows us, is a nation of many historical threads, interwoven and united in the present moment. Where we come from informs what we are and even who we are today.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including several award-winning works of literary criticism as well as the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and Tradition and the Black Atlantic. Gates has hosted ten PBS television specials, including Looking for Lincoln and the two part series, African American Lives, upon which his book In Search of Our Roots (2009) was based. He is winner of the 2009 Ralph Lowell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Television and the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Non-Fiction.