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/
