Slavery Remembered

A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives

Paul D. Escott

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780807813430
  9780807813409
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807864203
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Slavery Remembered is the first major attempt to analyze the slave narratives gathered as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. Paul Escott’s sensitive examination of each of the nearly 2,400 narratives and his quantitative analysis of the narratives as a whole eloquently present the differing beliefs and experiences of masters and slaves. The book describes slave attitudes and actions; slave-master relationships; the conditions of slave life, including diet, physical treatment, working conditions, housing, forms of resistance, and black overseers; slave cultural institutions; status distinctions among slaves; experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the subsequent life histories of the former slaves.

An important contribution to the study of American slavery, Slavery Remembered is an ideal classroom text for American history surveys as well as more specialized courses.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Slavery Remembered
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: The Narratives as a Source
• 1. Two Peoples and Two Worlds
• 2. Conditions of Life: The Slaves’ Experiences on the Plantation
• 3. Improving the Conditions of Life: Forms of Slave Resistance
• 4. Bases of a Black Culture
• 5. “Seeing How the Land Lay” in Freedom
• 6. “Starting Uphill, den Going Back”
• 7. Life Patterns of the Freedom Generation
• Afterword
• Appendix A Methods of Recording and Coding Information
• Appendix B Race of Interviewers
• Appendix C Additional Tables
• Appendix D New Narratives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index