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

United States. Work Projects AdministrationProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.0
Word count
487K words
Chapters
49

Tags

English Originals Oral HistoryDocumentary Literature Historical ReappraisalSlaveryEveryday LifeFolk MemoryPortrait GallerySocial CritiqueWitness of SufferingDocumentary NarrativeRacial MemoryAmerican South

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 1, 2004

Editor's review

This book is a compilation of oral histories of African American slavery collected under the auspices of the U.S. Work Projects Administration; it is primary folk historical material. Its value lies not in literary polish but in letting people once denied the chance to write leave their voices through self-narration: details of labor, family, religion, migration, and life before and after emancipation all appear in plain colloquial speech. Reading it, one clearly senses the tension between the interviewers' framework of questions and the interviewees' rhythms of narration, which is itself an entry point for source criticism. As a public-domain e-book, it is easy to search and excerpt, and is suitable as auxiliary material for American history, African American literature, and oral history methods. Note that the original text retains dialect spellings and period prejudices; readers should enter with an awareness of source criticism rather than reading it through as a complete, coherent narrative work.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the editor's note and interview background first, then choose pieces by theme; there is no need to read straight through from page one.
  2. Prepare a table recording interviewer, interviewee, place, and time for easy cross-comparison.
  3. When you meet dialect spellings, do not translate word by word; grasp the tone and narrative logic first, then return to details.
  4. Read alongside chapters of a general history of American slavery, placing the oral material back in historical context for analysis.

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

Is this book a complete and coherent memoir? No. It is a compilation of oral records from multiple interviewees; each piece is independent, varying in length and detail, and bearing the live traces of interview collection. It should be read as a collection of historical sources rather than a single narrative work; reading by theme or person is more effective.
Do all dialect spellings in the original need to be fully understood? Not necessarily. Dialect spellings mainly preserve phonetic features, and word-by-word scrutiny slows reading. It is advisable to read a passage first to grasp the general meaning and tone, then return to key verbs and place names. For citation research, check the original words against a reliable edition.
What should be noted when using it as a public-domain e-book? The public domain makes copying and searching easy, but when citing, note the source as this project text and verify page or paragraph locations. Also note that the original interviews carry period prejudices and questioner guidance; when citing, explain the context and avoid treating a single oral account as universal experience.

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.