Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

A documentary on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harlem's Savoy Ballroom.

"The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been...

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...

The migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North and West during and after World War II is retold through personal stories of a group of Chicagoans born in the Mississippi Delta. Goin' to Chicago chronicles one of the most momentous yet least heralded sagas of American history - the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North and West after World War II. Four million black...