From 1936 to 1938, the Works Projects Administration (WPA) commissioned writers to collect the life histories of former slaves. This work was compiled under the Franklin Roosevelt administration during the New Deal and economic relief and recovery program. Each entry represents an oral history of a former slave or a descendant of a former slave and his or her personal account of life during slavery and emancipation. These interviews were published as type written records that were difficult to read. This new edition has been enlarged and enhanced for greater legibility. No library collection in Kentucky would be complete without a copy of Kentucky Slave Narratives.

CLARK CO.(Mayme Nunnelley)Most Kentucky superstitions are common to all classes of people because the Negroes originally obtained most of their superstitions from the white and because the superstitions of most part of Kentucky are in almost all cases not recent invention but old survivals from a time when they were generally accepted by all Germanic peoples and by all Indo-Europeans. The only class of original contributions made by the Negroes to our stock of superstitions is that of the hoodoo or voodoo signs which are brought from Africa by the ancestors of the present colored people of America. On the arrival of the negro in America, his child like mind was readily receptive to the white man's superstitions. The Black slave and servants in Kentucky. . . .

Slave Narratives is a work by the Work Projects Administration. It presents narratives from freed former American slaves describing their memories while enslaved and what they did following freedom.

The ten works collected in this volume demonstrate how a diverse group of writers challenged the conscience of a nation and laid the foundations of the African American literary tradition by expressing their in anger, pain, sorrow, and courage. Included in the volume: Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw; Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; The Confessions of Nat Turner; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Narrative of William W. Brown; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb; Narrative of Sojouner Truth; Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of J. D.Green. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.

Autobiographical accounts of former slaves compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration.