Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers' Project interviewed more than 2,000 former slaves under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. The massive undertaking resulted in the Slave Narrative Collection, consisting of more than 10,000 typed pages of transcripts stored in the Library of Congress. This original collection draws upon the archive's wealth of materials to present a wide range of authentic slave narratives from Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
These remarkable firsthand accounts of life in bondage offer vivid testimony from field hands and house servants, who describe their experiences in simple, direct, and moving terms: working from dawn to dusk and beyond, enduring physical abuse, living in fear of separation from family, and facing endless indignities. A priceless record of the opinions and perspectives of slaves in America, this book offers a valuable resource for students, researchers, and historians as well as other readers.
