"Finding my Roots" by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

My romance with history began in the fifth grade, in the 1960–1961 school year, in a class taught by the only male teacher in my West Virginia elementary school, Mr. McHenry. Our ancient history textbook had at most a few line drawings and no photographs at all that I recall, but it sucked me in with the indiscriminate force of my mother’s brand-new Electrolux vacuum cleaner. How ancient history made it into the curriculum of a fifth-grade class in a public school in the hills of West Virginia has long puzzled me. What I wouldn’t give to own a copy of that textbook! Its power to transport put Walt Disney’s “Fantasyland”—must-watch television every Sunday night—to shame.

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