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WPA slave narratives

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Roscoe Lewis sets up to record an interview of formerly enslaved people in Petersburg, Va., as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. (Hampton University Archives)

How Researchers Preserved the Oral Histories of Formerly Enslaved Virginians

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed 300 formerly enslaved Virginians to share their oral histories.
by David A. Taylor via Washington Post Magazine on July 19, 2022
Photograph of a former slave interviewed by the Federal Writers' Projects

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.
by Clint Smith via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021
Colorized photograph of formerly enslaved family outside of their cabin

The Color of Freedom

This collection of colorized portraits transforms ex-slave narratives into freedom narratives in order to better remember the individuals who survived slavery.
by Lee Hedgepeth via Scalawag on February 5, 2021

Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?

How Depression-Era racial dynamics may have shaped our understanding of antebellum enslaved life.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on July 6, 2016
Lucindy Lawrence Jurdan stands at her spinning wheel.

Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

A collection of more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 photos of former slaves.
via Library of Congress on January 1, 2015
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
W.E.B. Du Bois speaking in 1949.

During Reconstruction, a Brutal ‘War on Freedom’

First-person accounts of those scarred in many ways by the era’s violence suggest Reconstruction did not fail, it was overthrown by violence.
by Stephanie McCurry via Washington Post on January 25, 2023
A group of formerly enslaved people at a county almshouse, c. 1900.

Juneteenth Is About Freedom

On Juneteenth, we should remember both the struggle against chattel slavery and the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction.
by Dale Kretz via Jacobin on June 19, 2021
Immigrant mother and child embracing

As American as Family Separation

Though the cruelties of the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy were unique, they were part of an American tradition of taking children from parents.
by Hari Kunzru via New York Review of Books on June 9, 2021
Rethinking Rufus book cover

The Rape of Rufus? Sexual Violence Against Enslaved Men

"Rethinking Rufus" argues that enslaved black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women.
by Thomas A. Foster via NOTCHES on October 27, 2020

Equal-Opportunity Evil

A new book shows that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable as it was for men.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on February 14, 2019
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Grappling With the Overthrow of Reconstruction

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.
by Eric Herschthal via The New Republic on March 23, 2023
Two Choctaw men

Choctaw Confederates

Some Native Americans chose to fight for the Southern cause.
by Fay A. Yarbrough via Humanities on January 11, 2023
Enslaved African Americans hoe and plow the earth and cut piles of sweet potatoes on a South Carolina plantation, circa 1862-3.

"She Had Smothered Her Baby On Purpose"

Enslaved women's use of birth control, abortifacients, and even infanticide showed that they resisted by exerting control over their reproductive lives.
by Signe Peterson Fourmy via Age of Revolutions on July 25, 2022
Portrait photograph of John B. Cade.

John B. Cade's Project to Document the Stories of the Formerly Enslaved

There are revelations in a newly digitized collection of slave narratives compiled by a professor and his students during the Great Depression.
by Susanna Ashton via JSTOR Daily on January 26, 2022
Vintage drawing of a rural area with snowfall. In the foreground, two horses are pulling a man in a cart on the snowy road.

Cox’s Snow and the Persistence of Weather Memory

One of the worst snowstorms recorded in Virginia’s history began on Sunday, January 17, 1857. It remained in Virginians' collective memories eighty years later.
by Patricia Miller via Encyclopedia Virginia on January 5, 2022
Yams under concrete with the leaves growing out of a crack in the sidewalk

The Deep and Twisted Roots of the American Yam

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.
by Lex Pryor via The Ringer on November 24, 2021

The Enduring Lessons of a New Deal Writers Project

The case for a Federal Writers' Project 2.0.
by Jon Allsop via Columbia Journalism Review on December 22, 2020
Artwork titled Notes from Tervuren, featuring a figure against a multicolored painted music sheet.

Talking Drums

On the relationship between African American music traditions and one of the most infamous slave revolts, the Stono Rebellion, in colonial South Carolina.
by John Jeremiah Sullivan via Oxford American on November 19, 2019

Slavery and the Family Tree

How do you make a family tree when you may not know your family history?
by Whitney Nell Stewart via Black Perspectives on May 15, 2019
Lithograph of Black wet nurse nursing a white baby.

The Double-Edged Sword of Motherhood Under American Slavery

How did enslaved mothers contend with the possibility that their children could be sold away from them?
by Emily West via Uncommon Sense on May 7, 2019
Julia Ann Jackson, age 102, whose narrative was recorded by the WPA, 1937-1938.

Demanding to Be Heard

African American women’s voices from slave narratives to #MeToo.
by Stephanie Richmond via Nursing Clio on June 12, 2018

Say Goodbye To Your Happy Plantation Narrative

Only a small percentage of historical interpreters are black, and Cheyney McKnight is trying to change that.
by Zoë Beery via The Outline on March 28, 2018

American Slavery: Separating Fact From Myth

Before we can face slavery, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history, we must dispel the myths surrounding it.
by Henry Nash Smith via The Conversation on June 19, 2017

America's Other Original Sin

Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans — they enslaved them, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on January 18, 2016
Students and teacher talking about homework at Islamic School in Seattle.
partner

Islam and the U.S.

What does it mean to be Muslim in America? And how has the practice of Islam in the U.S. changed over time?
via BackStory on December 18, 2015
Film still of Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in "Gone with the Wind."

The Mammy Washington Almost Had

In 1923, the U.S. Senate approved a new monument in D.C. "in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South."
by Tony Horwitz via The Atlantic on May 31, 2013
University of Ohio
partner

The Late Unpleasantness in Idaho: Southern Slavery and the Culture Wars

Culture warriors envision a future in which the educational power of universities will be harnessed to the propagation of a “biblical worldview” nationwide.
by William L. Ramsey via HNN on December 19, 2004

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