In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next.

For Farina King, these stories are history. In her work as a historian and citizen of the Navajo Nation, she listens to voices often left out of official records. Oral histories, she shows us, are not just sources. They are relationships. They carry emotion, identity, and the power to connect past and present in deeply personal ways.

Today, Dr. King joins us to discuss how oral histories transform our understanding of families, communities, and the significance of history itself. We’ll explore how listening, truly listening, can be an act of scholarship, of care, and of cultural survival.

In eighteenth-century England, not every family story turned on courtship and heirs. Many households were held together by single adults who managed budgets, cared for nieces and nephews, and kept the letters and ledgers that became a family’s memory. Their lives were both social and practical. Music in the parlor. Trips on the Thames. Decisions made around a shared table rather than an altar. When we shift our view from marriage and descent to the bonds among siblings and cousins, we see a different map of kinship. It is lateral. It is durable. It shapes how families work.

In today’s episode of Reunion, we explore that world through Amy Harris’s Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried, a study of the Sharp family across three generations that shows how unmarried kin shaped household economies, caregiving, philanthropy, and abolitionist work; it asks us to see aunts and uncles and single siblings as central actors in family governance and legacy, suggests genealogy is about values as much as property, and invites us to read portraits, epitaphs, and paper trails for the stories singles preserved; and Amy Harris joins us to discuss single sociability, householding beyond marriage, and how re-centering lateral kin changes what family history can do.

In the 1930s, while her husband, Elijah Muhammad, was imprisoned, Clara Poole (later known as Clara Muhammad) quietly stepped into leadership. She wasn’t given a title. She didn’t stand at a pulpit. But she taught the children, organized the women, and held the Nation of Islam together. In a movement that promised both protection and patriarchy, Clara found a way to lead from within. Her story is not unique. Across the early years of the Nation of Islam, Black women built schools, sustained families, and shaped theology, often behind the scenes, always at the center. They navigated a religious world that asked them to submit, even as it relied on their strength.

In The Promise of Patriarchy, historian Ula Y. Taylor uncovers the lives of these women, showing how they negotiated faith, family, and gendered expectations to shape a movement that would transform Black religious and political life in America. Today, Ula joins us to talk about how power moves through families, how women lead in spaces that don’t always recognize their leadership, and how history remembers (or forgets) them.