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: 470K words
Chapters: 47

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 Interviews. Author: United States. Work Projects Administration. Language: English. Class: E300: History: America: Revolution to the Civil War (1783-1861). Release Date: Dec 2, 2009

Editor's review

This book is a compilation of oral interviews with formerly enslaved people organized in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project of the U.S. Works Progress Administration, and it has the character of a primary historical source. Its value lies not in literary rhetoric but in letting formerly enslaved people and their descendants speak in their own voices about labor, family, religion, and life after emancipation, preserving a wealth of dialect, tone, and personal memory. Readers should recognize the interviewers' framing of questions, recording methods, and the limitations of the era, and should not treat every sentence as unmediated testimony. For historians, oral-history students, and public-history writers, it is important material for understanding how the memory of American slavery was collected and preserved; for general readers, it is better suited to selective reading and topic-based searching than to continuous reading from cover to cover.

Who it's for

A good fit for

History specialists studying American slavery and oral-history methods
Teachers and students needing primary sources for coursework or teaching preparation
General readers interested in African American memory and public history
Writing students interested in interview forms and dialect transcription

Not a good fit for

Readers hoping for coherent narrative or literary memoir
Readers impatient with the arrangement of historical documents and dialect transcription
Beginners needing modern scholarly annotation and critical introductions

Reading tips

Read the project background and interview notes first to understand the collection method, then move to specific oral accounts.
Read selectively by theme or region, using maps and timelines so scattered information keeps its context.
While reading, distinguish the interviewee's own words from the interviewer's record, and note distortions introduced by dialect transcription.
Compare with relevant scholarly introductions to place the oral material back in its specific 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.

FAQ

Were these oral interviews recorded in real time?

The interviews were collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, some time after slavery had ended, and are therefore retrospective recollections. Memory bias, interviewer prompting, and editing all affect the text, so it should be read as mediated historical material rather than immediate testimony.

Does the dialect spelling in the book hinder understanding?

Some interviews preserve the interviewees' dialect pronunciation and grammar, and the spelling may obstruct modern readers. It is advisable to read a few passages to get used to the feel of the language, infer difficult sentences from context, and not insist on word-for-word correspondence with standard English. For research, keep the original spelling and note transcription issues.

Should general readers read it from beginning to end?

Not necessarily. The book is large and uniform in format, and continuous reading easily becomes tiring. A more effective approach is to read selectively by region, theme, or person, taking brief notes on a few pieces at a time, noting recurring experiences of labor, family, and religion, and then returning to the overall structure.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

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.