New PBS Series, "Faces of America" to air in 2010

A four-part genealogical series, Faces of America is scheduled to air next year. Written and presented by Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Faces of America hopes to give an understanding and identity to America’s melting pot of immigrants.

The June 30th WNET.org announcement states,

“Since 2006, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr has been helping people find long-buried details of their recent and distant ancestries by restoring the branches of their individual family trees and then analyzing their DNA. Faces of America expands the role of DNA science to take the exploration of identity to an entirely new level. The series will film the sequencing of the full human genome for two of the series’ participants – a scientific and filmic first – to reveal detailed information about their ancestral make up.

Currently in production throughout Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia, anticipate broadcast of Faces of America on PBS in 2010. Faces of America is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers.

“We will reveal in rich detail the fascinating stories about our guests’s ancestors, both since their arrival as immigrants to the United States, and before their arrival here, in the countries from which they emigrated,” says Professor Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. “We hope to show how immigration of peoples from around the globe so profoundly has reshaped what it means to be ‘an American’ and continues to affect how we talk about identity throughout our society today.”

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