"We Sort of Stumbled across It"

"The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace Mr. Obama’s maternal ancestry to the time and place where Mr. Punch lived. The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times reports on research indicating that President Obama is a descendant of "the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave" in colonial America.

Erin Aubry Kaplan reacts to the news in the Los Angeles Times.

"The First Shots in the American War of Independence Were Fired in England"

"The interesting thing about these colonists was their radicalism, their revolutionary fervor. They were Puritans—but they were more than that. They were merchant-venturers, looking for new markets and business opportunities. They were more than that, too. They were idealists, who went to extraordinary lengths and traveled extraordinary distances to fight for the chance to build a fairer society."

Adrian Tinniswood in The New York Times discusses American colonists who fought in the English Civil War.