From Overview:
In creating his new book, Empire’s Children: Finding America By Another Name, author Francis Smith undertook a 50-state road trip. He organized his quest around a once vital and ubiquitous cultural symbol, Columbia. In so-named places, Smith originated insightful color photographs of diverse people and places. In his writings he uses Columbia both to spin stories of the road and to wrestle with the notion that the 50 states themselves constitute an empire. Readers seeking renewed understanding of the United States will find both challenge and comfort in these pages.
Poets, songwriters, and everyday people used Columbia as a sort of poetic nickname for the United States. Columbia also symbolized those hard to define quantities of liberty, union, and progress. On its darker side, Columbia’s derivation from Christopher Columbus speaks to the race-based enslavement and land theft that fueled our founding and expansion.
No matter their inheritance from the American empire (shades of poverty or riches, gradations of safety and precarity), Smith presents his diverse photographic subjects as equals. In his writings he illustrates his Northern European ancestors enriching themselves through the racialized theft of labor and resources as they settled several different towns called Columbia. A white man, the author himself grapples with unearned privileges and unwanted racist thinking.
Unexpectedly, Smith’s journey led him to friendship with African American journalist and cultural historian A’Lelia Bundles. Considering the context that Smith’s antebellum ancestors had enslaved her own (the parents of haircare magnate Madam C. J. Walker), Bundles writes the book’s afterword. In it, she explores how this shared family history affects her friendship with Smith today.
In Empire’s Children, Francis Smith renders insightful inquiry and understanding. His book will greatly add to our national conversation about creating a nation that truly lives up to its ideals.
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America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us Questions
America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us's website is https://www.americabyanothername.com/
America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us's LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/company/america-by-another-name
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America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us's industry is
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America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us's categories are Book and Periodical Publishing
America By Another Name: Photos And Stories Of The Road And A History That United Us's founding year is 2010
