Family

"I think the key change for the invention of the modern father is in the 1920s," says historian Robert L. Griswold.

A historian turned novelist ponders the absence of women from America's historical archives.

For the frontier women of the 19th century, the experience of childbirth was harrowing, and even just expressing fear was considered a privilege.

Zora Neale Hurston’s long-lost oral history with one of the last survivors of the Atlantic slave trade.

Finding a puzzle from the past in a family member’s basement.

Even before mass media coverage of child abductions, American parents had reason to fear the worst if their child went missing.

An enslaved woman who jumped from a building in 1815 is later revealed to be the plaintiff in a successful lawsuit for her freedom.

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

In excavating the story of King’s visit to Harlem Hospital, I uncovered my grandfather’s own fight for civil rights.

Restoring agency to enslaved people means acknowledging not only that they created marriages, but that they ended them, too.

Dezmond Floyd, age 10, has an open discussion with his mother Tanai about what happens during his school’s active shooter drills.

Although she’s often overshadowed by her husband, Anna made his work possible.

Jane Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility.

The story of the artist behind Exxon's famous logo.

African American marriages before and after the Civil War.

When it comes to intellectual partnerships, sometimes an acknowledgment is enough.

There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine. 

At Prospect Hill, people came from as far as Liberia for an unlikely gathering that led to a scene of visible emotion – with ‘a lot to talk about.'

“It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.”

How changing gender norms and conceptions of childhood shaped modern child custody laws.

For most of our history, the U.S. government treated biracial Americans as if we didn’t even exist, but my family has stories to tell.

For most of its history, monogamy was a rule only applied to married women.

A genetic mutation in some New Mexico communities can be traced to a common ancestor who came to the area more than 400 years ago.

Secrecy, shame, and sealed adoption records.

Pat Tillman’s life and death is an all-American story. It’s just not the kind that Donald Trump and his supporters want it to be.

An interview with historian Charles B. Dew.

How Alice Collins Plebuch’s foray into “recreational genomics” upended a family tree.

Red-baiters deserve at least part of the blame for the shortage of affordable, high-quality pre-K.

The roots of rice in South Carolina's Lowcountry are troubling and complicated. Today, we stir the pot.

My questions about my grandmother's death – from a self-induced abortion – haven’t changed since I was 12. What feels new is the urgency of her story.