Also American
The story of Black America, from the first Africans to today.
Black history is American history — not a separate shelf, but the same one read in full. The struggles recorded here, from bondage to the long denial of the vote, are the nation’s own to reckon with; the achievement built in spite of them ranks among its finest. This is the American story told whole — a people written out of it, written back in.
Happy Juneteenth.
On June 19, 1865, U.S. troops reached Galveston, Texas, and freedom finally reached the last enslaved Americans — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It is the country’s oldest celebration of the end of slavery. Today we mark it the best way we know how: by telling the whole story, and teaching it to the next generation.
Ways in
Start at a century and zoom in to decades, years, and individual days.
Open the timelineA map of massacres, lynchings, lost Black towns — and the excellence — near you.
Open the mapTrace stolen labor to the banks, universities, and companies it enriched.
Open the ledgerCurated paths that connect events into one story, with narration at each stop.
Choose a trailTrace a single system, movement, or field across time — pick from the full list.
Choose a themeSee how people, events, and systems connect — the links most histories miss.
Open the graphTeach your children real history.
Each One Teach One is a chronological, age-graded home curriculum — one story walked together, with age-appropriate books and documentaries at every stop. A few hours a month, ten times the depth a classroom has time for.
One root runs through all of it: greed.
Following historian Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel, this site treats the love of money — not an ancient, free-floating hatred — as the root of American racism. Slavery, the slave codes, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration start to look less like separate evils and more like one machine, retooled across centuries to keep extracting Black labor and wealth.
See how it connectsTwo histories, one people
History is more than oppression. Switch between the two tracks any time — the same toggle appears on every page.
The timeline at a glance
Each block is a decade. Hover for what defined it; click to dive in.
Move across the timeline to focus a decade · click to open it
Browse by century
Each century is titled by what defined it. Click to zoom into decades, years, and days.
Guided trails
Short, curated paths that connect scattered events into a single story.
How the legal logic of owning Black people, after abolition, became a caste system — a fixed, inherited rank rebuilt through convict leasing, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration.
How American law turned human beings into property — owned, priced, and inherited — and why that legal category was different from every other form of exclusion.
For a brief, radical decade after the Civil War, Black Americans voted, held office, and built institutions — until a violent campaign of "Redemption" tore it all down. Follow the rise and fall.
Follow the secret network from the plantation to Canada — the conductors, the escapes, and the records that preserved their names.
Follow the line from the kingdoms of West-Central Africa, through the Middle Passage, to the docks of the Chesapeake and Charleston — and the culture that survived the crossing.
From the courtroom victory of 1954 to the bullet in Memphis in 1968 — the campaigns, the people, and the laws that broke the legal back of Jim Crow.
Follow the chain from a Cold War proxy war to the prison cells of Black America — a connection rarely taught as a single story.
From the kingdoms of Africa, through the invention of American slavery, to the Black fight for freedom in the Revolution — a guided path through the era most timelines skip.
After Reconstruction collapsed, Black America faced its lowest point — and answered with mass migration, new institutions, and a cultural and political awakening.
Browse by system & movement
Follow a single force, system, or movement across the centuries.
Driving forces
Systems of oppression
Movements of resistance
Looking for sources?
Thousands of free films, books, primary documents, and recordings — searchable and organized by era and theme.