We sometimes imagine that such oppressive laws were put quickly into full force by greedy landowners. But that's not the way slavery was established in colonial America. It happened gradually ...

This is a follow-up to a story that appears in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. On a fall morning in 1937, an Emory University geologist was walking down a hallway in the ...

Virginia was being held back. Thanks to tobacco, it had the means to make money. What was needed, though, were laborers -- laborers to clear fields, to plant and harvest crops. During the 1620s ...

An ancient DNA (aDNA) study at the 17th-century English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, has identified two of the town's ...