Family

On the complex history of “passing” in America.

As a student in Paris and a photographer at the Washington Times-Herald, the future First Lady worked behind the lens to bring her own ideas into focus.

During the Civil War, women secretly enlisted as men in the Union Army. No one suspected a thing...until they gave birth.

The idea that non-white immigrants are, generally speaking, new to the Midwest could not be further from the truth.

In the sixties and seventies, fighting for the rights of queer people was considered radical activism. To Jeanne Manford, it was just part of being a parent.

A mass murderer of 1955.

The symbolic battles of World War I.

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.

The sacrifice of Captain Noah Grant, during the French and Indian War, may have influenced Ulysses S. Grant, as he decided to rejoin the U.S. Army in 1861.

The second wife of Thomas Edison, she viewed domestic labor as a science, calling herself a "home executive."

The role of family in Huey P. Newton's educational journey.

Netflix’s “The Pale Blue Eye” portrays Edgar Allan Poe as a young West Point cadet. Here’s the true story of his brief, failed military career.

One war, in one city, Philadelphia, and the fate of the men, women, and children left behind as collateral damage in the wake of conflict.

We're born with a hunger for connection with our ancestors – both biological and spiritual.

In Virginia, the land still owned by the Coles family could yield billions in uranium. Does any of that wealth belong to the descendants of the enslaved?

Many of the ­private colleges and universities in the US arose as much out of vanity as necessity. But for morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford.

What the story of the Grimke family tells us about race in the United States.

The author of a book about William Still unearths new details about the leading Black abolitionist—and reflects on his lost legacy.

Meet the duo who helped achieve the most important labor and civil rights victories of their age.

How Black landowners in eastern North Carolina are recovering generational wealth lost to industry encroachment.

An excerpt from a new book on the so-called "Jewish Kennedys."

The complex story of wet nurses and their children in the time before the advent of baby formula.

The problem no longer has no name, and yet we refuse to solve it.

Amid a rise of laws forbidding discussions of racist histories, sharing our ancestors’ shameful wrongdoings is more urgent than ever.

I wish I’d asked my grandfather more questions.

When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.

A researcher delves into the past to tell the story of a relative—falsely accused as a boy of a crime in Jim Crow–era South Carolina.

Enslaved women's use of birth control, abortifacients, and even infanticide showed that they resisted by exerting control over their reproductive lives.

Her death was listed as ‘manic depressive psychosis,’ and it sent five of her six children to orphanages.

Craig McNamara’s family did not talk about the Vietnam War. He spent his life asking questions about it.