WHO ARE WE?
Slavery, Its Descendants, and the Making of America — Book One: The Record
WHO ARE WE? — Slavery, Its Descendants, and the Making of America begins with a simple problem: records often preserve the transaction more clearly than the person. Book One: The Record works in the opposite direction. It starts with the surviving evidence and asks how much of the human story can be reconstructed without allowing a price, inventory entry, census line, estate file, or legal category to stand in for a life.
The book follows enslaved people through court records, probate files, bills of sale, petitions, advertisements, census material, family records, land documents, military records, and archival collections. Each source is treated as evidence with limits. Names are connected cautiously. Family relationships are distinguished from hypotheses. Contradictions, missingness, and uncertainty remain visible instead of being smoothed away.
At the center of the project is a larger question of American identity. Slavery was not an isolated institution sitting outside the nation’s development. Its records intersect with law, finance, inheritance, land, labor, migration, family formation, and public memory. Book One reconstructs those intersections while refusing to reduce descendants to a single historical experience or to turn genealogy into spectacle.
WHO ARE WE? is both a history book and a demonstration of the larger Consonance archival method: trace the claim, preserve the source, reconnect the person, widen the frame, and leave room for correction. The goal is not to tell readers what they must conclude. It is to put more of the record back in front of them — with the people inside it.