Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of
Description: Oral history interviews sometimes reveal the central role that a mentor can play in the life of a young person, changing the road taken in that person’s life.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="National Museum of Natural History physical anthropologists Lucille St. Hoyme (1924-2001), J. Lawrence Angel (1915-1986), and Thomas Dale Stewart (1901-1997) hold a seventeen and one half foot long beard found in a North Dakota attic, 1967, by Unidentified photographer, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution