* In 1948 Aptheker published Negro People in America.
* In 1951 he published A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. Over the ensuing four decades, he would produce several additional volumes in this series, including Colonial Times to 1910; Reconstruction Years to the Founding of the NAACP; Beginning of the New Deal to the End of the Second World War; and Alabama Protests to the Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
* Additional book titles penned by Aptheker include: To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History (1948); Documentary History (1951-75); Nature of Democracy, Freedom, and Revolution (1968); Unfolding Drama (1979); Afro-American History: The Modern Era (1986); The Literary Legacy of W.E.B. DuBois (1989); and Anti-Racism in U.S. History (1992).
* Aptheker twice (1939 and 1969) won the history award from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life & History).
* Aptheker was also an early supporter of Negro History Week, which evolved into what is now called Black History Month.
* Serving in the U.S. Army from 1942-46, Aptheker saw action as an artillery officer in Europe and rose to the rank of major.
* When leftist philosopher Sidney Hook and his ilk asked publicly why Aptheker was silent about the Stalinist purge in Czechoslovia that led to the execution of leading Jewish Communists, Aptheker stated that the Communist government had shown that the defendants were not only guilty, but also anti-Semitic.
* In her 2006 book, Intimate Politics, Bettina Aptheker reveals that her father had forcibly masturbated on her body “from early childhood until age thirteen,” and had subsequently used threats to terrorize her into silence.