In the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together, creating—among other things—a new economy. At the center of that economy was the plantation, an enterprise dedicated to the production...

In its broadest sense, African American history predates the history of the United...

It is difficult today to recapture the iconoclasm signaled by Oscar Handlin’s opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Uprooted more than fifty years ago: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still...