As Newman memorably announces, "the Mother of all mail days has come"! Yep, Mothers Day 2012 is officially here. Newman (being a postman) would probably want you to send a card or a letter, but that’s so old fashioned! So here’s the perfect gift to your mom on their day: the best selection of the websites from our Parenting Faves that are inspired or meant for them. (Don’t worry, if you take credit for finding such awesome sites, we won’t tell… Our little secret!)

Genealogy is intriguing enough and doesn't need star treatment.

Yet, when it comes to TV, shows such as NBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?" rely on celebrities to shake their family trees for our entertainment and ratings.

Sure, it's fascinating that some A-listers descend from French nobility while others come from slaves; but in a culture where celebrity is accomplished too easily and tabloid headlines lead the news cycle, we could do with a few less tales from Tinseltown.

Tracing your ancestry is all about filling in stories, says Dr. Henry Louis Gates, which is why he’s looking for descendants of Irishmen who lived in Cumberland, Md., in the 1850s and 1860s.

When he was a student at Yale, Henry Louis Gates Jr. took a course known as "biology for poets." Now the Harvard humanities scholar is a zealot of genetic science.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker had always known there had to have been white ancestors in his family’s past. He is African American but has a light complexion and blue-green eyes. No one was sure who those white ancestors were, just that they probably existed.

The Root was on location at a screening of an episode of the new PBS series Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The basic drive to discover who we are and where we come from is at the core of the new 10-part PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the 12th series from Professor Gates

Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the new PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” takes VIPs Kevin Bacon, John Legend and Samuel Jackson, among others on a journey back in time, examining their roots using genealogy and family histories. The series premieres Sunday, March 25.

It was a decade when tens of millions of people in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.

AOL and PBS today launched Makers: Women Who Make America, a multi-platform initiative that aims to become the largest-ever and most dynamic collection of women’s stories.

Today, just in time for Women’s History Month, AOL and PBS launched a digital video and broadcast initiative celebrating women called “MAKERS: Women Who Make America.” Out of 100 American women interviewed for the project, 10 will be Latina, including Rita Moreno, Linda Alvarado and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

AOL, in partnership with PBS, is proud to announce the launch of "MAKERS: Women Who Make America." MAKERS is a landmark digital video and broadcast initiative. Produced by filmmakers, the multi-platform initiative aims to become not only the largest but also the most dynamic collection of women's stories ever assembled.

New York -- AOL and PBS on Tuesday launched "Makers: Women Who Make America," a digital video and broadcast initiative to showcase a collection of stories from women who helped shape the women's movement in the United States.

In 2013, PBS will broadcast a 3-hour documentary about the Women’s Movement and its impact over the last half century. Yet, in a move that is new for PBS, the public television network isn’t waiting for the film’s debut to release a web site — it’s doing it now but in a very unique way and with a special partner.

Today AOL, a premier digital media company, and PBS, the nation's largest non-commercial media organization, are launching "MAKERS: Women Who Make America," an unprecedented digital video and broadcast initiative. Produced by filmmakers, the multi-platform initiative aims to become not only the largest but also the most dynamic collection of women's stories ever assembled.

In early April, the group will be screening the HBO documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words followed by a Q&A session with Amy Richards of Soapbox, Inc., Ms. Magazine, and feminist.com.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African & American Studies, used genetic analysis to explore his ancestry—and those of Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, and others—for the PBS television series African American Lives. In March he returns to the subject with a new series called Finding Your Roots, which features such celebrities as Barbara Walters, Martha Stewart, and Robert Downey Jr. As I did for a feature in this week’s issue, Gates had his own genome sequenced. Here he discusses his unexpected heritage, his health, and how genetic data made him cry.

SHEILA NEVINS, the longtime president of HBO’s documentary film division, calls Gloria Steinem “next to my mother, the most important woman I’ve ever met.” But when asked about Ms. Steinem, the most familiar face of the women’s movement, her staff had a different reaction. “We went up and down the halls of HBO and half the kids on the floor didn’t know who she was,” Ms. Nevins said.

Using DNA to trace your ancestry can satisfy curiosity (Henry Louis Gates Jr. was surprised to find out he was half white, for example), but in a recent interview with Sanjay Gupta Jr., Gates -- The Root's editor-in-chief and host of PBS's Finding Your Roots series -- talks about what else it can do.

HBO topped the list of winners at the 2010 Creative Arts Emmy Awards with 17 golden statuettes, followed by ABC with 15.

In a bit of unintentional synchronicity, the HBO documentary on feminist icon Gloria Steinem "Gloria: In Her Own Words" airs mere weeks before NBC trots out period soap "The Playboy Club." Steinem's first foray into controversial journalism and, one could argue, feminism was an assignment from Show magazine to go "undercover" as a Playboy bunny. And though the NBC series clearly did not use Steinem's story, which focused on the arduous physical and emotional working conditions of the bunnies, as background, it did enable Steinem to make headlines; while doing publicity for the documentary, she called for viewers to boycott "The Playboy Club."

Gloria Steinem has frequently spoken about the importance of sharing stories, using the imagery of communicating oral narratives around an ancient campfire. She has done that with her own personal history in the HBO documentary, Gloria: In Her Own Words. Responding to questions asked by director Peter Kunhardt and co-producer Sheila Nevins, Steinem has added depth to readily accessible facts by opening up about the darker corners of her emotional life.

HBO premieres a documentary tonight at 9:00 p.m. called Gloria: In Her Own Words, which features activist Gloria Steinem discussing her career in both journalism and feminism, her memories of the women's movement of the 1960s, and the birth of Ms. magazine. And they are, indeed, her own words. There are no other voices outside of those found in archival footage — perhaps Barbara Walters asking her to tap dance during an interview or Harry Reasoner confidently predicting Ms. would never last more than a few issues. Why? Because they'd said everything there was to say about feminism in the first issue, and he couldn't imagine what else there was to write. (He ate crow later.)

Steinem, it hardly needs mentioning, was the face of Second Wave feminism, and though she resists the description “icon,” there are many who consider her to be just that. Steinem is now 77 and still active in the feminist movement. Last night she went on the Colbert Report to talk about the documentary, which, Colbert joked, is only 75% as long as documentaries about men.

It takes a long time and considerable patience to get to that surprise denouement of “Faces of America,” a four-part PBS series, beginning on Wednesday, about family roots by the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. And even with charming celebrities — Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan are among the 12 whose genealogy is explored almost back to Paleolithic times — the telling can at times be a little wearisome.

You've seen them on the big screen, on television or in the anchor's chair, but where do America's most prominent people come from. That's the question scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out to answer in a new series appropriately called "Faces of America" which traces the genealogy of famous Americans. Gates appeared today on "Good Morning America" to talk about the show and give co-host George Stephanopoulos a big surprise about his own lineage: He could be distantly related to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has become such a perpetual figure in American politics that it's easy to think of him as more memorial than man, one of the capital's landmarks -- the Mall, the Smithsonian, the White House and Teddy Kennedy in the Senate.