Family history opens a way to study memory, emotion, power, and connection. It gives historians a flexible method for understanding slavery and migration, religious conversion, and cultural memory.

Episode 1: Genealogy and Power with Karin Wulf

In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-seventeenth century, a woman named Mary Aggie stood before a judge not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or