Henry Louis Gates Jr.

'Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field,' says Henry Louis Gates Jr., who helped develop the curriculum.

"A lot has been hidden from Black Americans. And so there is always a longing to know who you are and where you come from.”

From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.

In "A Nation of Descendants," Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

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.

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

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

We have good reason to remember the story of what happened to hubristic rich people, and the imprisoned poor, in an enormous opulent floating palace.

From My Lai to Desert Storm to WMDs.

Acknowledging the queer culture of the Harlem Renaissance is essential in order to paint a full picture of the period.

Efforts to rescue African American burial grounds and remains have exposed deep conflicts over inheritance and representation.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

Be Woke presents Black history in two minutes (or so).

The backstory to the backstory of America’s mythic promise.

A scholar of the history of race sets out on an exploration of his own family roots, and despite his better judgement, is moved by what he discovers.

Be Woke presents Black History in two minutes (or so).

Armed with footnotes, we can save democracy.

Oak Bluffs is a complex community that elite families, working-class locals and social-climbing summerers all claim as their own.

John Oliver reflects on the history of Confederate monuments.

Archaeologists have uncovered the slave quarters of Sally Hemings at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello mansion.