Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery

SEVERAL YEARS AGO IN BACKGROUND OF THE SLAVE NARRATIVE COLLECTION (1967), I described the social and historical factors that contributed to one of the most noteworthy achievements of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s-the Federal Writers' Project's Slave Narrative Collection.' In appraising this effort to interview former slaves, I noted that these interviews had been neglected by historians and social scientists, but predicted that, as new perspectives and models of slavery-especially those concerned with the ways in which slaves experienced and responded to bondage-were advanced, these personal testimonies would represent an essential source of data. In the past decade this prediction has been borne out, and it is now time to assess their use in recent scholarship.