Collections of Slave Narratives

The following resources provide numerous slave narratives and other primary source documents. The narratives are from both oral history transcriptions and from written narrative. These resources also provide links to other helpful sites about the life of enslaved people and their stories.

Resources

Edited by Steven Mintz from the University of Houston, these excerpts from slave narratives offer primary accounts of the various aspects of slavery from enslavement to emancipation.
Excerpts from Slave Narratives

An index of slave narratives from an online anthology, these narratives are the work of over 2,300 interviews of former slaves. The interviews were conducted between 1936 and 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration. This is a selection of the entire collection of narratives found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).
WPA Slave Narrative Interviews

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery is an expansive resource for further information about life in slavery, slave agency, and the abolition of slavery. The Gilder Lehrman Center is part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition