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I received an e-mail this week from the  folks at ABC-CLIO telling me that for Black History Month they’ve just added more than 1,000 slave narratives from the famous Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project to the African American Experience database. You can read the 2006 RBB review of African American Experience (but keep in mind that a lot has changed; there’s an entirely new interface, for example). 

During the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project collected more than 2,000 interviews with elderly ex-slaves. When the Writers’ Project was terminated, the slave narrative collection, formally called Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, was organized into bound volumes and sent to the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress. 

In 1972, Greenwood Press published the entire series in an 18-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Biography. Supplements were published in 1978 and 1979. In 2000, Greenwood turned all this content into a rather clunky (well, it was 2000) database, Slave Narratives, which explains why ABC-CLIO (of which Greenwood is now a part) was able to add some of the narratives to African American Experience. You can read more about the Greenwood/ABC- CLIO connection to the narratives here.

The narratives, as well as a detailed history of the project, can also be found at Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938,  part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory Collection.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 at 10:08 am and is filed under In the News, Reference Sources, Web Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.