American Slave Narratives - 2 views
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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.
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The slave narrative project of the WPA in the 1930s is one of our greatest historical preservation efforts. Today, historians are scrambling around to preserve the narratives of Holocaust survivors and WWII vets, as they are rapidly leaving us. This is a good way to introduce the importance of oral histories. It would also be a good piece to start a lesson on evaluating primary sources.
