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

United States. Work Projects AdministrationProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.2
Word count
596K words
Chapters
60

Tags

English Originals Oral HistoryWorld History Historical ReappraisalRacial IssuesSubaltern VoicesSocial CritiqueMemory of HardshipDocumentary NarrativeSuffering NarrativeMemory WritingAmerican SouthOrdinary Perspective

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 StatesAuthor: United States. Work Projects Administration,Language: English, Class: E300: History: America: Revolution to the Civil War (1783-1861), Release Date: Mar 8, 2007

Editor's review

This oral archive of slave narratives, collected under the auspices of the U.S. Work Projects Administration, is an important primary source for hearing the voices of people who lived through American slavery. Its value lies not in systematic argument but in preserving a large body of ordinary people's spoken testimony: work, family, religion, escape, and conditions after emancipation, all carried in the speakers' tone and the gaps of memory. Reading it, one feels both the preciousness of the historical material and an awareness of how the interviewers' framing and the era's limitations shaped it. For historians, it is a grassroots voice to be read against archives and local histories; for general readers, it offers slices of life more concrete and more unruly than any textbook. Because these are oral transcriptions, the language contains dialect and incomplete sentences and requires patience. Read with methodological awareness, noting who asks, who answers, what is recorded, and what is passed over.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or background on the collection to understand the interview project's aims and limits before entering the main text.
  2. Read a few narratives at a time, noting each speaker's region and age and the interviewers' questioning style for cross-comparison.
  3. Read against newspapers, local histories, or abolitionist documents of the same period, noting discrepancies between oral and written sources.
  4. Do not get stuck on dialect spellings word by word; grasp the narrative thread first, then return to key passages.

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

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FAQ

Were these narratives written by the enslaved people themselves? No. This was an interview project organized by the Work Projects Administration, in which interviewers recorded and transcribed respondents' oral accounts; the texts therefore mix the speakers' language with the recorders' writing habits. The interview framework and transcription process must be taken into account when reading.
There is a lot of dialect spelling and it is hard to read. What can I do? Read through paragraphs first to grasp the general meaning rather than checking every word; make simple comparisons of recurring spelling variants. For research purposes, keep the original text and note transcription features rather than rewriting it in standard English and losing the oral traces.
Is it suitable as teaching material for oral history methods? Yes. The material directly presents problems such as questioning frameworks, recorder intervention, and selective memory, and can train students to identify interviewer influence, compare different narrative versions, and discuss power relations in the formation of archives.

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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.