Skip to main content

ETHNOS_APP

Home • Search • Journals • List 0

The Privilege of Family History

Bibliographic Data

ID5736032
AuthorsKendra Taira Field (Tufts University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume127
Issue2
Pages600-633
Publication date2022-09-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ahr/rhac151
OpenAlexW4296472167
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This article situates the recent phenomenon of historians writing openly about their own familial and kin networks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of family history as a scholarly field, this article foregrounds the experiences and words of a number of African Americans who engaged in a diverse range of historical, genealogical, archival, and memorial "family history" work over the last two centuries. In the context of slavery, I approach family history as a form of enslaved resistance and anti-slavery argument. In the post-emancipation era, I consider African American family history within and beyond the nascent historical profession amid the racist national backlash to Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era. From the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance to the modern civil rights era, I explore the popularization of African American family history, the rise of the "new" social history, and the waves of men and women who entered the profession at the intersection of scholarship and social movement. In closing, I reflect upon African American family history in the post-civil rights era, from Roots to the rise of genetic genealogy, and the legacies of these transformations for the historical profession

African-American history · Context (archaeology) · Emancipation · Genealogy · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Privilege (computing) · Scholarship · Social history (medicine) · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

  • Inheriting the family

    Katie Barclay, A Barnwell et al.•Emotions and Society•2024

  • Accessing the emotional and intangible

    Laura King•Emotions and Society•2024

  • The Troubled House

    Open Access•Andrew May•Genealogy•2023

  • Black residents of Windsor, Ontario during the U.S. Civil War

    Adam Arenson•The History of the Family•2025

  • Ordinary Ottomans

    Aline Schlaepfer, Jordi Tejel•Contemporary Levant•2024

  • Precarious privileges

    Open Access•Funda Soysal, Alp Yenen•Contemporary Levant•2024

  • The Century’s Firstborn

    Open Access•Madina Thiam•History in Africa•2025

Unique citing works7
Citations per year2,33
Citation span2023 - 2025 (3)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 5

Tools

Open DOI
Ethnos_APP • Open Source Project • MIT License • Frontend v2.0.0 • Privacy and Cookies • API Documentation: api.ethnos.app/docs • API Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17049435 • Frontend Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17050053 • cruz.rio.br • Expectantes Misericordiae