Family

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.”

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.

Yvonne Seale on a bizarre and fanciful piece of genealogical scholarship and what it tells us about identity in late 19th-century America.

The fate of Aaron Burr's daughter remains a topic of contention.

The stories of two American soldiers – one part German, the other born in Japan – challenge our romantic view of the "Greatest Generation."

Was bringing home an Indian boy-after slaughtering his family-an act of compassion or of political expedience?

How Theodore's Roosevelt's personal tragedies inspired him to reform America's cities.

The history of a myth.

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees, but genetic testing can provide some clues.

The rights and responsibilities of 17th-century fatherhood in England's North American colonies.

A personal investigation of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864.

Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before age seven. What are we hiding from ourselves?