Observations of GRBs and GRB environments over the past nine years strongly indicate that the long-duration/soft-spectrum GRBs are the death cries of massive stars and the birth cries of black holes. Redshifts have been measured for about seventy of these GRBs and their implied isotropic-equivalent luminosities show them to be the biggest bangs since the Big Bang itself, beating supernovae by six to nine orders of magnitude. Given the sometimes extreme brightness of their optical/NIR afterglows in the first few seconds to minutes after the burst – in one case the afterglow was bright enough to see with binoculars despite a redshift that placed it three-quarters of the way across the observable universe – and a high expected rate of occurrence at and beyond the highest redshifts that have been measured for any astrophysical object, GRBs are widely expected to be the next great probe of the early universe, allowing astronomers to reach back in time roughly three times closer to the Big Bang than has been achieved to date.