Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews

United States. Work Projects AdministrationProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
352K words
Chapters
36

Tags

English Originals Oral HistoryDocumentary Literature Historical ReappraisalPortrait GallerySouthern PastFate and FortuneHumanistic CareCivic AwarenessDaily ReflectionsSocial CritiqueDocumentary Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From InterviewsAuthor: United States. Work Projects Administration,Language: English, Class: E300: History: America: Revolution to the Civil War (1783-1861), Release Date: Feb 23, 2011

Editor's review

This book gathers the results of the oral history project organized by the U.S. Work Projects Administration in the 1930s, collecting slave narratives compiled from interviews with eyewitnesses. Its value lies not in literary polish but in the raw texture of first-hand voices: interviewees describe work, family, religion, escape, and life after emancipation in their own words, with dense detail and restrained yet powerful emotion. Readers can see the concrete shape that grand history takes in individual lives, and feel the breaks, repetitions, and dialect traces peculiar to oral testimony. As primary material for studying American slavery, African American history, and public memory, it is best read with a questioning mind rather than as a coherent narrative work. It should be read alongside historical background, with attention to how interviewers' questions and recording conditions shaped the material.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or editors' notes first to understand the background and recording methods of the interview project, then move to individual pieces.
  2. Read in thematic groups—work, family, religion, emancipation—to avoid fatigue from reading straight through.
  3. Mark dialect, repetition, and contradictions as you go, treating them as features of oral testimony rather than flaws.
  4. Read alongside a general history of American slavery to help place each narrative in its historical context.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36

FAQ

Is this book a complete personal biography? No. It is a compilation of many interview records, each centered on an interviewee's experience, but because of questioning methods and recording conditions the content often jumps, repeats, and leaves things undeveloped—closer to fragments of historical material than to a complete biography.
What historical background is needed to read it? It helps to have a general understanding of Southern society around the American Civil War, the basic forms of slavery, and the oral interview projects of the 1930s, so you can better judge the historical position and limits of the material.
Why are the dialect and spelling in the book inconsistent? Interview recorders often spelled interviewees' speech phonetically, and different recorders handled it differently, so the text shows variations in accent and spelling. This is itself information from the oral record and should not simply be treated as error.

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About the author

United States. Work Projects Administration Author

The United States Work Projects Administration was a federal public works agency established in the United States in the 1930s, and its Federal Writers' Project organized the collection, compilation, and publication of a large body of oral history materials. The library holds 34 of its works, most of them centered on African American slave narratives; the representative Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States series was assembled from interviews with formerly enslaved people and their descendants. These texts preserve, in the interviewees' own voices, details of life under slavery, folk songs, and dialect expressions, making them both valuable historical sources and works of plain folk literature. As public information about the agency is limited, this note introduces only its editorial direction and the subject matter of its works.