Microsoft Encarta Africana is designed to be a comprehensive multimedia encyclopedia produced from and for an African-American perspective. Through audio recordings, video clips, interactive demonstrations, and an exhaustive library of articles and papers, Encarta Africana chronicles Black culture and history, celebrating the achievements of people of African descent around the world. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professors of Afro-American Studies at Harvard Universtiy, collaborated on this Microsoft project and have also developed lesson plans based on the interactive encylopedia. This is the third edition of the volume, which was first published in 1998.