Family

At the heart of my family tree are only questions and mysteries.

A new book juxtaposes dominant narratives about motherhood, women’s autonomy, and abortion with the weirdness of ordinary lives.

Aimee Towi Mae Tang’s Chinese American family never talked about the past. She decided to change that.

Uncovering the fallacy of his iconic image as a man ruled by solely by reason and logic.

DNA tests have become popular tools to rediscover lost ties to the past, but the links they forge do not always stand up to historical scrutiny.

It’s never been easier to piece together a family tree. But what if it brings uncomfortable facts to light?

John Gunther’s “Death Be Not Proud” defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.

West Ford’s descendants want to prove his parentage—and save the freedmen’s village he founded.

Abortion in the 19th century was widely accepted as a means of avoiding the risks of pregnancy.

The Great Migration in the 20th century changed the face of America. For the past few decades, it's been reversing.

History has paid little attention to Bridget Kennedy, JFK’s widowed great-grandmother, who managed both her family and business in Boston's anti-Irish climate.

When Executive Order 9066 forcibly removed my family from their community 80 years ago, we lost more than I realized.

The revolutionary may have tried to find my grandfather by raiding a New Mexico village—but a friend’s camera truly captured our family patriarch.

'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?'

The poet’s memoir Generations is both a chronicle of her ancestral lineage and lesson in the centrality of Black women to the story of American history.

The memoirs of Korean adoptees, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

A new volume of Robert Frost’s letters finds him at the height of his artistic powers while suffering an almost unimaginable series of losses.

Thomas Jefferson imagines an unequal gender utopia.

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball’s white supremacist great-great-grandfather becomes a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery.

In “The Loneliest Americans,” Jay Caspian Kang asks whether Asian American identity can be rescued from people like him.

While our perceptions of grandparents have remained static, we've asked them to do a lot more.

At three plantations in Charleston, S.C., Black descendants are connecting with their family’s history and helping reshape the narrative.

Law and culture forced LGBTQ people into marriages, but that didn't prevent them from exploring their sexuality.

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?

The president has skillfully played up his Irish roots, but the story of his ancestry is more complicated.

After decades of keeping her identity a secret, Jane Roe’s child has chosen to talk about her life.

The little-known story of Robert Carter III.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

DNA testing kits have shifted the way both researchers and the public think about race and identity. This shift is evident in the 2020 U.S. Census data.

The murderous hysteria over white patrimony is inseparable from the private capture of both economic opportunity and political authority.