A new website oriented towards African-Americans, the Root, has been advertising relentlessly—at least on the Washington Post’s homepage, where I see it nearly every time I log on for my usual news-junkie’s helping of politics news.

Its top three stories over the long weekend have been (in this order): “The Bush Family’s Slaveholding Past,” “Is the NBA Losing Street Cred?” and “Where Bush is a Rock Star.” This last piece is about Liberia—on “The Continent” as its author calls it—where Bush’s rather unheralded intervention (a dispatch of warships and a few Marines) caused the strongman Charles Taylor to abandon at last his ruinous presidency. Of course, most of the article is just the author exclaiming shock that Bush would be loved by anyone, anywhere, and is otherwise short on details.

Altogether, The Root can seem snide, myopic, self-victimizing, and even occasionally paranoid. However, it does have one fascinating feature, and that is the eponymous “Roots” section.

There have been few areas of African-American history so vulnerable to revisionism and fantasy than black Americans’ roots in Africa—beginning with the book Roots and ending in the wild world of “Afrocentrism,” which still has a home in places where it shouldn’t. (As of last year, for instance, the gift shop of the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art was stocked with a book alleging that Africans had crossed the Atlantic long before Europeans and contributed to or had even begun Mayan civilization.)

But Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, the scholar on whom The Root is relying for much of its “Roots”-related content, has brought a helping of needed precision to the field. His family histories of several black celebrities are carefully researched, and this and last year a PBS program that he narrated traced others’ genetic heritage to particular ethnic and sub-ethnic groups in Africa.

The work is full of information that complicates African-American history, and in particular the excerpts of Gates’ videos with Don Cheadle and Morgan Freeman are well worth watching. In Cheadle’s, some precious assumptions are shattered when Cheadle learns his ancestors were enslaved not by white people but by Chickasaw Indians, who as a “separate nation” were able to defy the Emancipation Proclamation. Freeman’s is touching and perhaps I’m just in a mood today, but it actually brought me to tears.

Either way, good work in a field and on a website that clearly need it.