The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries; autobiographies; narratives; and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War; more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection; a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38; the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves; most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution;" to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States.―Norman R. Yetman; American Memory; Library of CongressThis paperback edition of selected Missouri narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers; just as they were originally typed.
#3735752 in Books 1971-04-26Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 .58 x 6.01 x 9.16l; .86 #File Name: 01554837142 pages
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