Faces of America

As a nation of immigrants, the American experience is vibrantly defined by the diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage of its people. Americans carve out their personal histories by tracing genealogies, combing through family archives, and mining the stories and family trees of their elders. But how far back into your past can you actually go? If you could look even 400 years into your genetic history, what would that really look like? Since 2006, scholar and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been helping African Americans find long-buried details of their ancestries by analyzing their DNA and then marrying that information to a wealth of historical data. Global in scope, Faces of America looks outside the Black experience to explore the roots and identities of twelve of America's most recognizable and extraordinary citizens, who are of Asian, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Syrian, West Indian, and Native American ancestry: Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert, writer Louise Erdrich, writer Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, writer and director Mike Nichols, former monarch of Jordan Queen Noor, surgeon and author Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and Olympic gold medalist and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. Each of the celebrity subjects in Faces of America underwent dense genotyping to trace their father's line, mother's line, and their percentages of European, Asian, Native American, and African ancestry. Gates and his father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., also took part, making medical history in the process as they both had their entire genomes - six billion base pairs - sequenced and analyzed by geneticists at the Broad Institute and the Harvard Medical School. Faces of America unfolds as a rollicking journey into the ancestral past. Readers will share in the surprise, delight, shock and profound education of the subjects themselves as their rich family stories, traced back to their arrival on America's shores, and beyond, deep into the history of their countries of origin, are revealed. America, as Gates shows us, is a nation of many historical threads, interwoven and united in the present moment. Where we come from informs what we are and even who we are today. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An influential scholar in the field of African American Studies, he is the author of twelve books and has hosted and produced ten documentaries, including the acclaimed PBS series "African American Lives," which inspired his book In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past. Gates is co-editor, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, of the African American National Biography (an eight-volume biographical dictionary).