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.