How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word “American”? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history — and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke ...

When These Are Our Lives was first published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A. Beard hailed it as “literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction, not excluding Zola’s most vehement passages.” A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty–five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories c...

"Twenty-nine oral histories and additional excerpts, selected from 2000 interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s for a WPA Federal Writers Project, document the conditions of slavery that . . . lie at the root of today's racism." — Publishers WeeklyIn the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration commissioned an oral history of the remaining former slaves. Bullwhip Days is a remarkable compendium of selections from these extraordinary i...

Zora Neale Hurston brings us Black America’s folklore as only she can, putting the oral history on the written page with grace and understanding. This new edition of *Mules and Men*features a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more.For the student of cultural history, Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America’s folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up ...

Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938, assembled by the Library of Congress Project, Work Projects Administration (WPA), sponsored by the Library of Congress, and first published in 1941. As explained in the introduction: "The present Library of Congress Project, under the sponsorship of the Library of Congress, is a unit of the Public Activities Program of the Community Service Programs of the Work Projects Administration for the District of Columbia. Acco...

Recommended by Entertainment WeeklyThe hilarious, uncompromising novel about African American domestic workers—from a trailblazer in Black women’s literature and now featuring a foreword by Roxane GayFirst published in Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One of the Family is a wry, incisive portrait of working wo...

First-Hand Accounts of Slavery in America. With active Table of contents. Hundreds of former slaves were interviewed during the depression as part of the WPA project sponsored by the Library of Congress. This file includes all parts dealing with former slaves in Florida. Other files, published separately, focus on other southern states. In all, there are some two thousand narratives from the following seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Marylan...

Nate Shaw's father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an "over-average" man who ...

"A Best Book of the Year" —Library Journal and BooklistUsing excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writer's Project, this astonishing collection makes available in print the only known recordings of people who actually experienced slavery--recordings that had gathered dust in the Library of Congress until they were rendered audible for the first time specifically for this collection....

De massa call me and tell me, "Woman, I’s pay big money for you, and I’s done dat 'cause I wants you to raise me chillum. I’s put you to live with Rufus for dat purpose. Now, if you doesn’t want whippin’ at de stake, you do what I wants." I thinks ‘bout Massa buyin’ me off de block and savin’ me from bein’ separated from my folks, and ‘bout bein’ whipped at de stake. Dere it am. What am I to do?So asks Rose Williams of Bell County, Texas, whose l...

‘Christopher Cricket on Cats’ is a wonderful text, penned by Anthony Henderson Euwer (1877 – 1955). As the title suggests, it is a book of wisdom for both young and old. Euwer was an American Author, and feline fanatic, who dedicated this children’s story: To all the Cats that ever Meowed On this or any Sphere,– From the beginning of all Time Unto this Present Year. This charming verse is beautifully illustrated throughout with Euwer’s graphic black-and-white illustrations. Aside from his ...

When you think of early Texas history, you think of freedom fighters at the Alamo and rugged cowboys riding the plains. You usually don’t think too much about slavery in the Lone Star State. Although slavery existed in Texas only from the second decade of the 19th century to the close of the Civil War, the majority of early settlers came to Texas from other Southern states. When they moved westward, they brought their slaves with them. When the Federal Writers’ Project sent interviewers ac...