Roots
by Alex Haley
Tracing one American family back to where it began.
For you if
you want to understand the slave trade as a story with a specific beginning in a specific place rather than an abstraction called history
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Haley spent twelve years tracing his family back through American slavery to Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka man from the Gambian village of Juffure who was enslaved in 1767. Whatever its factual complications — and there are some — Roots changed how Black Americans related to Africa and how America understood slavery. Not as an abstraction but as the severing of a specific person from a specific place. The dispatch that made the connection between the African coast and the American South visible for the first time to millions of readers.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
- Themes
- family lineageslavery
- Topics
- atlantic slave trade
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
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