Dear colleagues:

>>Harold S. Forsythe wrote:

. . . the WPA narratives are the endpoint of slave autobiography collection.
 John Blassingame did an excellent job of tracking down most other sources
but there still may be some out there.
>>

Harold makes an important point.  There is a valuable collection of earlier
slave autobiographical materials online from UNC at
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/.   A number of other Web sites that have
digitized some of these materials are listed at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snrelated.html#sites, and there is an
additional Library of Congress collection of audio-recorded interviews
online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/.

The Blassingame work that Harold cites is John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave
Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and
Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977;
Library of Congress call number E444 .S57).  Other printed sources, not
including those discovered in the last several years, are listed in the
"Slave Narratives" section of the bibliography at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snrelated.html#bib.

One other point: someone mentioned that the historical collections online at
the Library of Congress are not necessarily from the Library's own holdings.
 That is correct, but only to a very limited extent, and in those few cases
when the original materials are held entire or in part by another
institution, the provenance is clearly displayed on the collection's home
page:  see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/petitions/ for a nice
example.

Best wishes--

--Jurretta Heckscher

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