The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White
The Hairstons – The story of the black and white Hairston families exemplifies the tangled history of race in America. One family used to own the other. Henry Wiencek spent nearly eight years researching and writing the extraordinary saga of these families from the late 1700s to the 1990s. The white Hairstons presided over an empire of some forty plantations and farms in Virginia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and other states, and owned thousands of slaves. The black Hairstons rose from the dust of slavery to take their rightful places in American society. Sharing a name, a devotion to their ancestral home places, and in many instances a common bloodline, the Hairstons have struggled toward a reconciliation over a bitter, violent past. Henry Wiencek
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The author of numerous books, Henry Wiencek won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography for The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. His book about George Washington and slavery, An Imperfect God, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and the Best Book Award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. His latest work, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, was chosen by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2012. He has been awarded fellowships at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, where he was the inaugural Patrick Henry Writing Fellow. He is currently at work on a joint biography of Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
