United States. Work Projects Administration
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. Administrative Files
Selected Records Bearing on the History of the Slave Narratives
"Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves" is a collection compiled between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers' Project. Over 2,000 interviews with formerly enslaved individuals across seventeen states preserved more than 10,000 pages of firsthand accounts. While invaluable for documenting experiences that would otherwise have been lost, historians debate the collection's limitations, as primarily white interviewers may have influenced how subjects shared their stories during the Jim Crow era.