Remembering Slavery

African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation

Marc Favreau

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781620970447
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Social Sciences

The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed

With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again.

No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America.

Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice).

With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Note
• Foreword to the 2021 Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction Slavery as Memory and History
• Editorial Method
• Chapter I. The Faces of Power: Slaves and Owners
• Chapter II. Work and Slave Life: “From Can to Can’t”
• Chapter III. Family Life in Slavery: “Our Folks”
• Chapter IV. Slave Culture: “honest and fair service to the Lord and all mankind everywhere”
• Chapter V. Slaves No More: Civil War and the Coming of Freedom
• Appendix 1 “Remembering Slavery”: The Radio Documentary
• Appendix 2 Recordings of Slave Narratives and Related Materials in the Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Short Titles Used in Notes
• Notes
• Afterword
• Index
• Copyright