Tonight (or whenever your local affiliate decides to air it), African-American Lives 2 premieres on PBS. The series "traces the ancestry of famous black people as far back as the written record allows, and then a little farther, thanks to the scientific magic of DNA analysis." This is a sequel; the first series was in 2006. Both were directed by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The lives that are examined include those of Tina Turner, Maya Angelou and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

African-American Lives 2 considers how identity evolves and how the past informs the present. As Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times notes in his review,

... the underlying narrative is one of accomplishment and how a people whose identity had been purposely stripped from them managed to create new identities for themselves, looking both to the future and a mythic past. ("Nobody wants their history to begin here," says Gomes of the search for African roots.) And Gates is less interested in the lingering negative socio-economic effects of slavery than in the way that even successful slave-descended African Americans carry that fact inside them.

Visit the official website for more, including fascinating historical timelines.