Episode 1: Genealogy and Power with Karin Wulf
In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-seventeenth century, a woman named Mary Aggie stood before a judge not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or character, but on genealogy. In early America, family history could mean the difference between bondage and freedom. A marriage was not alone. Across the colonies, people used family trees to claim land, assert status, and protect privilege. Genealogy wasn’t just a record of who begat whom. It was a form of power. It shaped who belonged, who ruled, and who was remembered.
In her book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, historian Karin Wulf uncovers how family history was used to build nations and force hierarchies, and sometimes challenge those same hierarchies. Today, we talk with her about how the past was organized through kinship, and why understanding those structures still matters in the present.
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TODAY'S GUEST
Karin Wulf is a historian whose work examines how ideas about gender and family shaped political practices and structures in early America, and how those ideas appeared in the ways people wrote. Her research often draws on texts that circulated outside printed books or formal correspondence (materials such as commonplace books, account books, almanacs, and notebooks).
Wulf is the Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University. From 2013 to 2021, she served as Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and taught at William & Mary for more than fifteen years. She has also taught at American University and Old Dominion University. Wulf earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University.
Her most recent book, Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025), explores how early Americans represented their family histories and what those representations reveal about the nation’s formative period. She is currently working on several projects, including a brief study of genealogy for Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series and a book on Esther Forbes and her works, including Johnny Tremain. Wulf has also published articles that extend the research behind Lineage.
In addition to her academic writing, Wulf has written for public audiences for more than a decade. She contributed regularly to The Scholarly Kitchen and her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and other publications.
SHOW NOTES
- Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (Penn State University Press, 1997).
- Ronald Chernow, Washington: A Life (Penguin, 2010).
- Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Simon and Schuster, 2017).
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Penguin Classics, 2009).
- Milcah Martha Moore, Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive, in Prose and Verse (Philadelphia: Joseph James, 1787).
- Jennifer Reeder (Guest), on Latter-day Saint Art Episode 2, Wayfare Magazine, PODCAST LINK.
- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
- Karin Wulf, "In Pursuit"
- Karin Wulf, "This Long-Ignored Document, Written by George Washington, Lays Bare the Legal Power of Genealogy," The Smithsonian, published June 18, 2019.
