It's always been about African-American history for Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In his latest project, the "African American National Biography," it's about people whom history has largely forgotten.

There's Cathay Williams, the only known female Buffalo Soldier. (She posed as a man when she enlisted in 1866.)

And there is Henry Box Brown, the slave who literally shipped himself to freedom in a wooden box.

"Their lives have been lost, and we've brought them back to historical record," Gates says. "They will never be lost again."

They and 4,000 others are part of Gates' eight-volume biography ($995). It was a seven-year project for Gates and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both professors of African-American history at Harvard University.

"For 200 years, people have been compiling biographies of black people in order to refute racist claims that black people were illiterate," Gates says. "I have been fascinated by these for a very long time. There have been over 300 (compilation biographies) published since 1808. Until today, the biggest had 626 entries. We have just shattered that record with eight volumes of all new material."

The new compilation is published exactly 200 years after the first one. It contains 1,000- to 3,000-word life stories of everyone from abolitionist Harriet Tubman and "Native Son" author Richard Wright to actor Morgan Freeman and singer Tina Turner. There are also bios of people such as Stagolee, the bad man immortalized in blues songs, and Ota Benga, a pygmy who ended up on exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904.

The encyclopedia-style stories span five centuries and were written by more than 1,700 contributors. All the entries will soon be online at the Oxford University Press site (www.oxfordaasc.com), where an additional 2,000 entries will be added over the next two years, Gates says. And he wants anyone who knows of someone who should be included to e-mail him at the Web site.

"There are lots of people who came to my attention because somebody said, 'You have got to include my uncle who created the light bulb.' We checked for historical accuracy, of course."

Next up for Gates and his team: a biography of Africans that he expects to take five years.

In Gates' "African American Lives 2," an unrelated project on PBS, he uses DNA to trace the lives of 12 famous African-Americans, including Freeman, Turner, Don Cheadle and Chris Rock, back to their roots in Africa.

But that's another story.