Benjamin Banneker and Us

Benjamin Banneker and Us PDF Author: Rachel Jamison Webster
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250827299
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

Benjamin Banneker and Us

Benjamin Banneker and Us PDF Author: Rachel Jamison Webster
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250827299
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker’s grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.

Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker PDF Author: Catherine A. Welch
Publisher: LernerClassroom
ISBN: 0822589974
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
True or False? Benjamin Banneker used a telescope and mathematics to predict a solar eclipse. True! In 1789, Banneker calculated when the moon would pass between the earth and sun. And he did it without any formal math or science training. As a young boy, he worked on the farm owned by his father, who was a freed slave in Maryland. He helped to survey and plot out the site for the U.S. capital city, Washington, D.C. He also published several almanacs that helped farmers, merchants, and sailors predict the weather and know the dates of holidays and festivals.

American Bibliography: 1793-1794

American Bibliography: 1793-1794 PDF Author: Charles Evans
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description


The Age of Genius, Updated Edition

The Age of Genius, Updated Edition PDF Author: Michael Bradley
Publisher: Infobase Holdings, Inc
ISBN: 1438182279
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Although mathematical innovation stagnated in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, scholars in southern Asia and the Middle East continued to preserve the mathematical writings of the Greeks and contributed new ideas to arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, as well as astronomy and physics. The five centuries from 1300 to 1800 marked the end of a rich period of cultural, mathematical, and scientific advancements in China, India, and Arabic countries, while witnessing new intellectual life in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The Age of Genius, Updated Edition acquaints middle and high school students with the lives and contributions of 10 intriguing but perhaps lesser-known mathematical pioneers of this time.

American Bibliography: 1790-1792

American Bibliography: 1790-1792 PDF Author: Charles Evans
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description


Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker PDF Author: Myra Weatherly
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 9780756515799
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Biography of the African-American man who, as a self-taught mathematician and astronomer, helped survey the site of the Nation's Capitol and published several popular almanacs.

The Life of Benjamin Banneker

The Life of Benjamin Banneker PDF Author: Laura Baskes Litwin
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 0766061140
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
The story of free African American Benjamin Banneker, who, despite growing up in a time of slavery, pushed through to make his dream of being an astronomer come true.

Star Territory

Star Territory PDF Author: Gordon Fraser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In Star Territory Gordon Fraser charts how the project of rationalizing the cosmos enabled the nineteenth-century expansion of U.S. territory and explores the alternative and resistant cosmologies of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous peoples.

The Life of Benjamin Banneker

The Life of Benjamin Banneker PDF Author: Silvio A. Bedini
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Revised and expanded in 1999 this definitive biography incorporates much new research undertaken since the book's first publication (Scribner's, 1972). Comments on the first edition:

Reading These United States

Reading These United States PDF Author: Keri Holt
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820372056
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Reading These United States explores the relationship between early American literature and federalism in the early decades of the republic. As a federal republic, the United States constituted an unusual model of national unity, defined by the representation of its variety rather than its similarities. Taking the federal structure of the nation as a foundational point, Keri Holt examines how popular print—including almanacs, magazines, satires, novels, and captivity narratives—encouraged citizens to recognize and accept the United States as a union of differences. Challenging the prevailing view that early American print culture drew citizens together by establishing common bonds of language, sentiment, and experience, she argues that early American literature helped define the nation, paradoxically, by drawing citizens apart—foregrounding, rather than transcending, the regional, social, and political differences that have long been assumed to separate them. The book offers a new approach for studying print nationalism that transforms existing arguments about the political and cultural function of print in the early United States, while also offering a provocative model for revising the concept of the nation itself. Holt also breaks new ground by incorporating an analysis of literature into studies of federalism and connects the literary politics of the early republic with antebellum literary politics—a bridge scholars often struggle to cross.