Vele was 16 when she embarked a slave ship in 1832 at Cameroons River in West Africa. Precillia Cozzens, 35, was registered as a slave in New Orleans in 1846. Domingos, age 6, was listed in an inventory of enslaved people at Aguiar Plantation, Brazil, in 1806.

The records of these three are among more than 750,000 of people, places, events, and sources available to search in a new open-source database called Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), a repository of information and stories about those who were enslaved or enslavers...

With more than 500,000 dead, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a nation touched by grief, compounded by the trauma of job loss, financial trouble, and everyday confusion, a mix that a Harvard psychologist said creates a complex and troubling picture of the country’s emotional landscape.

Christy Denckla, a research fellow at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology, said that with so many having died from the pandemic, few Americans at this...

The great room depicted in the image from 1864 will be instantly recognizable to many: a vaulted 9,000-square-foot space of elaborately carved wood topped by a stenciled ceiling. In the photograph, the interior of the banquet room in Harvard’s Memorial Hall (today the first-year dining facility Annenberg Hall) is flooded by sunlight streaming through two giant stained-glass windows at the far end of the frame; decorative lights hang down from above, portraits and marble busts adorn the wooden walls.

It is a quiet vision of architectural splendor, taken as the nation was embroiled in the...