Published: June 14, 2011
Words: 60,420 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781465870988

Short description

Jamestown Odyssey is a ground breaking book on race and family in America. It chronicles the author's journey researching his family's Southern history. When he discovers that he has ancestors and distant cousins in both the black and Native communities, he has to come to terms with his, and American society's, hidden racial prejudices. Many Americans, if they have the courage, will find the same.

Extended description

Jamestown Odyssey is a ground breaking, and provocative, book on race and family in America. To varying degrees, most Americans have some interest in who their ancestors are. Some are content to know something only about their grandparents. For others, like the author, it becomes an avocation. Most Americans can accept the horse thieves and rapscallions in their family history. But an odd thing happens with race. With the first hint that an ancestor might be from a different race, we drop them like a hot potato. We bury our heads in the sand and pretend this blood-relative, even though we share DNA, doesn't exist. Most Americans, despite the decades of social change, are chained knowingly, or unknowingly, to the bigotry of our ancestors. This bigotry rattles through their lives in small every day jabs and thoughts, and somethings in big disgusting actions as we view each other as fundamentally deficient in some way. Jamestown Odyssey is the author's personal journey in discovering.. (Read more) Jamestown Odyssey is a ground breaking, and provocative, book on race and family in America. To varying degrees, most Americans have some interest in who their ancestors are. Some are content to know something only about their grandparents. For others, like the author, it becomes an avocation. Most Americans can accept the horse thieves and rapscallions in their family history. But an odd thing happens with race. With the first hint that an ancestor might be from a different race, we drop them like a hot potato. We bury our heads in the sand and pretend this blood-relative, even though we share DNA, doesn't exist. Most Americans, despite the decades of social change, are chained knowingly, or unknowingly, to the bigotry of our ancestors. This bigotry rattles through their lives in small every day jabs and thoughts, and somethings in big disgusting actions as we view each other as fundamentally deficient in some way. Jamestown Odyssey is the author's personal journey in discovering and coming to terms with his living and dead distant cousins in the Native and black communities, and his Southern slave-owning ancestors. During his journey, he brings the reader along as he gum-shoes his way through America's premier genealogical centers, and visits several Indian reservation, Jamestown National Park, and Howard University. Along the way he uncovers long-buried American history, such as the life of the nearly forgotten titan John Mercer Langston, Bacon's Rebellion and its ties to the American Revolution, and the history of the Powhatan leader who nearly saved the Native Americans from extinction. In the end, the author reaches out to his fellow Langstons in the white, black and Native communities to bridge the racial gap that divides them. Jamestown Odyssey ends with a list of several hundred other settlers who's descendants likely followed the same interracial mixing the Langstons did, and challenges the reader to look into their family's history, There are tens of millions of Americans with roots to Jamestown and who are part of extended multi-racial families.
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Tags

bigotry, jamestown, indian american, race family biracial blackwhite relationships, genealogy, history american, langston hughes, histiography, john mercer langston, langston history, langston genealogy

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Reviews

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Review by: Robert Langston on March 24, 2012 :
Chip Langston is my youngest brother.
I know he has put many years research into this book,
It is well written and an easy read.
I learned not only about my family history but many things about this countries history that has not been taught in schools. If this background of our early history was taught I feel, as a veteran, that more people would have a greater understanding of how we got to be a sovereign country and the sacrifices it took and would be more appreciative and
patriotic. I also think more people would be willing to make the sacrifice of serving there country to preserve it's sovereignty.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: Marcellus Graham on Feb. 24, 2012 :
Chip Langston takes the reader along with him as he discovers his Langston’s ancestors in America, and at the same time discovers something about himself. This self-confessed “Connecticut Yankee” has to come to grips with the fact that his confederate kin owned slaves and fought for the South in the Civil War. He discovers things about early Virginia and Bacon’s Rebellion that most of us never learned in history class, and that his ancestors were in the thick of it. After confronting his own feelings about race and bias, he embraces the fact that he is kin to Native American Indians and a very famous African American John Mercer Langston.

Written in a casual and easy to read style, I highly recommend Jamestown Odyssey.
Marcellus Graham
(reviewed within a week of purchase)

Review by: James Langston on July 07, 2011 :
Interesting book in tracking down one's family tree. But even more compelling was the authors introspective review of his personnel feelings and outlooks as he made this voyage of discovery. Outstanding.
JKL
(reviewed the day of purchase)

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