Image above: Portrait of Mollie Williams (Mississippi), taken as part of the Federal Writers’ ProjectThis article was published online on February 9, 2021.On a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the : the idea that we have been stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify. I have listened to friends discuss the specific village in Italy their ancestors came from, or the specific town in the hills of Scotland.

William Henry Dorsey was an information hoarder. An African American of means who lived in 19th-century Philadelphia, Dorsey suffered from a “malady” that afflicted others of his era: archive fever. He spent much of his long life—he was born in 1837 and died in 1923—clipping newspaper articles and pasting them into one or another of nearly 400 scrapbooks, organized by topic.

… a human body would not make it
           to the seafloor intact                            *                     NO LOITERING  
               IN THE WATER                             

This article was published online on February 9, 2021.My high-school counselor at Western High School, an all-girls public school in Baltimore, was a rotund white woman with a pleasant but less than energetic countenance. She was wholly absent from my education until one day, after rumblings about affirmative action in colleges had begun shaking the ground that Negroes traversed to higher education, she suddenly summoned my mother and me for a meeting.

This article was published online on February 9, 2021.In 1862, an abolitionist from Philadelphia named Charlotte Forten decided to go south to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. She was taking up an important mission: teaching Black children, newly liberated by the Union Army, how to read. Two years later, she would describe for readers of The Atlantic the exhilaration she felt as she traveled to her post.