Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives
Documenting the American South is a digital library that offers online access to books, memoirs, images, songs, artifacts, diaries and more. The collection's emphasis is on the South's cultural, literary, and historic legacy, from its beginnings though the early 20th century.
North American Slave Narratives is one of the seven DocSouth collections, and includes all autobiographical slave narratives in English. The project documents "the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries." The approximately three hundred narratives were published as broadsides (Life, Last Words, and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith), pamphlets (The Confessions of Nat Turner), and books (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself). Other notable slave narratives include Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington, and Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave by Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert.
--Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian.
Comments
I'm really glad to see this project highlighted. I had the pleasure to learn a great deal about slave narratives from my ex-husband, Ronald Judy, whose dissertation included a very early work written in Arabic. The contention that Africans did not possess written languages and literacy (!) was used as a philosophical justification for de-humanization and slavery.
Posted by: kathryn murphy-judy | February 26, 2005 2:57 PM