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Editor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham lectures on her most recent publication, African American Lives

Recording the achievements of over 600 individuals, African American Lives is the most comprehensive biography of African-Americans published to date. Editors Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Henry Louis Gates Jr. worked from a master list put together by 16 of the nation's leading African-American scholars to select both famous and near-forgotten figures of the past 400 years for inclusion.

From Esteban, the earliest known African to land on America's shores, to professional golfer Tiger Woods, the stories of these men and women illuminate African-American history through the immediacy of personal experience. How do the personal choices and circumstances of a single individual shape the contours of a larger history? What editorial choices had to be made to limit this history?

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is professor of history and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. A prize-winning author and editor, she has devoted her research primarily to the history of African-American women. She is currently working on two books -- one a biography of NAACP field worker Katherine Johnson and the second on racial construction of citizenship as well as completing a study on the history of Lilly Endowment's grant-making to African-American religious institutions.