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American Slave Narratives:
An Online Anthology
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RELATED RESOURCES ON THIS SITE
From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from
across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under
the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most
born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided
first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and
on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding
the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives
so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing
the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative
taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life.
Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North
America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of
nineteenth-century
slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations
with masters, and religious belief.
This web site provides an opportunity to read a
sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at
the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be
found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).
American
Studies Hypertexts
at
the University of Virginia
This page was begun as part of the American
Hypertext Workshop at the University of Virginia, Summer 1996.
Bruce Fort
Corcoran Department of History
Randall Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
Last Modified: March 6, 1998

Another AS Hypertext