LOC Announces Slave Narratives Collection

The LOC has announced a new collection: "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938," now available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/ .  

The collection contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery, with 500 black-and-white photographs. The collection is searchable by keyword, browsable by name of narrator, or browsable by volume (the volumes are organized by state.) All-in-all there are over 9,500 pages of information here, not counting the photographs. 

The narratives vary. Some of them are descriptions of individuals with a history of their life and a few quotes. Some of them are closer to actual transcriptions of speech with a few comments from the interviewer. The narratives are typewritten with the occasional handwritten annotation; some are easier to read than others. Lengths vary (I saw narratives between one and seven pages.) 

The photographs are browsable by subject. Many of them are people but there are also pictures of building, receipts, and graves. Clicking on the small pictures will give you the original-sized versions and the option to download uncompressed, archival versions (which are VERY large -- several MB.) 

Posted to History-Slavery