About

Also American is an attempt to build one of the most comprehensive, usable records of Black American history — the descendants of those enslaved in the United States — from the first Africans on this continent to the present. The name answers Langston Hughes: “I, too, am America.” This is the American story they were written out of, written back in — not a memorial to what was done to a people, but the full record of a people who are also, undeniably, American: struggle and excellence, held together.

It is built on four ideas:

• A fractal timeline you can zoom from centuries down to a single day.
• Two parallel histories — struggle and excellence — behind one toggle, so neither story crowds out the other.
• A web of connections that traces the links mainstream history rarely draws together.
• A clear organizing argument: following historian Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel, we treat the love of money as the root that ties the systems together — greed built them; race was invented to justify them.

Read about scope, sourcing, and how contested history is handled in the methodology.