Skip Navigation

Scout Archives

Home Projects Publications Archives About Sign Up or Log In

Browse Resources

Slavery -- United States -- Personal narratives

Resources

View Resource Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

This collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress presents digitized transcripts of interviews of former slaves, conducted under the auspice of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a Depression-era Works Progress Administration program that put unemployed writers to work. Between 1936 and 1939, the FWP collected the life stories of ordinary people. In 1937, John A. Lomax,...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-fe...
View Resource Documenting the American South

Sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South (last mentioned in the April 18, 1997 Scout Report) is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. This Web site has grown considerably since its inception and currently contains over 1,000 books...

https://docsouth.unc.edu/
View Resource From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909

This collection of pamphlets written by African-American authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries boasts "complete page images of 397 titles . . . as well as searchable electronic texts and bibliographic records." Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project, the pamphlets constitute a wonderful collection of online primary resources in African-American history. Users...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/african-american-perspective...
View Resource Library of Southern Literature

The well known Documenting the American South Project (discussed in the April 18, 1997 Scout Report) has recently added this section, highlighted by twenty-five full texts, available in SGML (standard generalized markup language) and HTML formats. Included are A Diary From Dixie, by Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, five works by the African American writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt, two works by Ellen...

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/
View Resource North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries' Documenting the American South project (first discussed in the April 18, 1997 Scout Report--) brings us this collection of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century slave narratives. The collection, which was just completed last month, comprises 230 English-language narratives and many biographies of fugitive and former slaves....

https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/
View Resource The Church in the Southern Black Community

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries digitizes historical documents for their Church in the Southern Black Community online collection, part of the ongoing digitization of materials in the Documenting the American South series (see the April 18, 1997 Scout Report). According to its creators, "'The Church in the Southern Black Community' traces how Southern African Americans...

https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/index.html
View Resource The Frederick Douglass Papers

Yesterday, the Library of Congress' American Memory collection announced the first online release of the Frederick Douglass Papers. This release contains over 2,000 items including a partial handwritten draft of his third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and a biography of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, written by their daughter, Rosetta Douglass Sprague. In addition to...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/ab...
View Resource The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony

During the Civil War, Roanoke Island, located between the coast of North Carolina and the Outer Banks, became a refuge for escaped slaves, called contrabands or freedmen. This site, created by University of Virginia professor Patricia C. Click presents an account of the history and selected documents and maps of the Roanoke Island Freedmens Colony, as the community was known. Documents include...

https://www.roanokefreedmenscolony.com/
View Resource Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories

As part of the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, this engaging website offers first-hand audio recollections of the experience of slavery in the American South from 23 African-Americans. The interviews themselves were originally conducted between 1932 and 1975, and contain memories of their lives that include discussions of their feelings on slavery, their families, and on...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/a...