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Additional resources for this issue of History Now
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Slave Narratives
Here are some of the many modern anthologies of slave
narratives in print:
Andrews, William L, general ed. North Carolina Slave
Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses
Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Andrews, William L., ed. Six Women's Slave Narratives
(New York : Oxford University Press, 1988).
Bontemps, Arna Wendell. Great Slave Narratives (Boston:
Beacon Press,1969).
Carretta, Vincent, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology
of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the
Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky,1996).
Edwards, Paul. Equiano's Travels (London: Heinemann,
1997). This is a slightly abridged edition of the full
work: The Interesting Narrative of the Live of of
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which
was published in 1789.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives
(New York: Penguin, 1987).
Gates,Henry Louis, Jr. and William L. Andrews. Pioneers
of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the
Enlightenment,1772-1815 (Washington, D.C.: Civitas,
1998).
Taylor, Yuval, ed. I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology
of Classic Slave Narratives (Chicago: Lawrence Hill
Books, 1999).
Several of the individual narratives mentioned in the
essay are available in modern reprints with helpful introductions,
while others must still be consulted in their original
nineteenth-century editions:
Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative
of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man,
Who Lived Forty years in Maryland, South Carolina and
Georgia, As a Slave (Pittsburgh: J.T. Shryock, 1853).
Brown, William Wells. From Fugitive Slave to Free
Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown.
Edited and with an introduction by William L. Andrews.
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003).
Henson, Josiah. An Autobiography of the Reverend Josiah
Henson. With an introduction by Robin W. Winks. (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. With
a new introduction by Philip S. Foner. (New York: Dover
Publications, 1970).
For the complete text of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, see this University of Virginia
website:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hjhome.htm
The website also includes an excellent guide to resources
for Jacobs on the Web and in print:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-rel-resourc.htm#web
Be sure to check out the rest of the site’s “Resources
Index” for tools for teaching about Jacobs and her
narrative:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-rel-resourc.htm#web
For information on Frederick Douglass, visit the “American
Memory” website:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/doughome.html
The texts of the various editions of Douglass’s
memoirs can be found at the same site in the “In
His Own Words” section:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/words.html
One of the largest online collections of personal memories
of the life of slaves is found in the interviews that
the WPA conducted with former slaves during the Depression.
For the complete collection, go to the “Born to
Slavery” section of the “American Memory”
website:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
In addition, there are many online selections from the
WPA’s remarkable interviews (with useful accompanying
materials). Of particular interest is this one, in the
“New Deal Network,” which includes Lesson
Plans as well as a helpful reading list on slave narratives:
http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm
For earlier printed slave narratives, consult “American
Memory’s” “First-Person Narratives of
the American South, 1860-1920,” which is based on
printed texts at the University of North Carolina and
which includes several slave narratives:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncuhtml/fpnashome.html
Also try the University of North Carolina’s “North
American Slave Narratives,” an online collection
of slave narratives published in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, at:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/
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