Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

Book excerpt: The family, determined to honor the bicentennial of their founding ancestor's death by discovering everything possible about his life, opened burial plots in the hope of recovering DNA for genealogical tracing. What began as a scientific inquiry into African origins rapidly evolved into an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, literary analysts, geographers, genealogists, anthropologists, political philosophers, genomic biologists, and, perhaps most revealingly, a poet. Their common goal has been to reconstruct the life of an extraordinary African American and to assay its implications for the sprawling, troubled eighteenth-century world of racial exploitation over which he triumphed. From publisher description.