Making Roots: A Nation Captivated by Matthew F. Delmont


Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
Title : Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0520291328
ISBN-10 : 9780520291324
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 280
Publication : Published August 2, 2016

When Alex Haley’s book Roots was published by Doubleday in 1976 it became an immediate bestseller. The television series, broadcast by ABC in 1977, became the most popular miniseries of all time, captivating over a hundred million Americans. For the first time, Americans saw slavery as an integral part of the nation’s history. With a remake of the series in 2016 by A&E Networks, Roots has again entered the national conversation. In Making “Roots,” Matthew F. Delmont looks at the importance, contradictions, and limitations of mass culture and examines how Roots pushed the boundaries of history. Delmont investigates the decisions that led Alex Haley, Doubleday, and ABC to invest in the story of Kunta Kinte, uncovering how Haley’s original, modest book proposal developed into an unprecedented cultural phenomenon.

Making Roots: A Nation Captivated Reviews

  • Margaret Sankey

    Seeing that Roots was being remade for summer 2016 broadcast sent me back to the original book, miniseries and a new biography of Alex Haley....and some startling disappointment. When I first encountered it on VHS in the mid-80s, I was probably still the audience of the late 1970s and it seemed striking, uncompromising and confrontational. Delmont examines how Haley, a moderate Republican and not a historian or genealogist, with the aid of the tourist-seeking new Gambian government, discovered incidents from his family tree and assembled them uncritically, then honed his narrative through years of lecture tours--judging precisely how much a white audience would accept, and the stable family, black history theme of rising importance to the African-American community in the wake of the Moynihan report. Taking it a step further, the TV network then tailored the story for the 90% white audience, casting familiar and beloved white actors for viewers to identify with, dramatizing the narrative arc and filling out the female characters in a way that didn't interest Haley. This is why the results were so perfectly fitted to 1977's state of race relations and historical memory. Delmont, who teaches the American history survey regularly, is quick to forgive the plagiarism and the carefully crafted "fact-ion" for its utility in offering Americans any knowledge of the Middle Passage at all in contrast to more historically sound films or books inaccessible to mainstream popular culture or written off as exaggerations. This is a provocative meditation on the power of middle-brow culture and the dangers (and opportunities) of historical memory.

  • Carole Bell

    Initial thoughts. More to come: Making roots by Matthew Delmont is an important accomplishment-- a painstakingly researched and engaging behind the scenes analysis of a pivotal piece of American history. It's also a great case study of the symbiotic, sometimes troubling relationship between art and commerce in American culture.