Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 5

About this book

"Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from…" is a collection compiled between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers' Project. The work preserves over 2,000 interviews with formerly enslaved people across seventeen states, capturing their life stories before that generation disappeared. While preserving invaluable first-person accounts, the collection sparked debate among historians about bias, as primarily white interviewers documented these testimonies during the Jim Crow era, raising questions about how power dynamics shaped the narratives themselves.