Livesey, A WPA Interviews. In: Lockley, T and West, E, (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. Routledge. (Accepted)

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Abstract

The WPA Interviews provide historians with the most significant body of testimony of the formerly enslaved that is available today. This collection consists of more than 2300 interviews conducted between 1935 and 1941 by previous out-of-work writers employed by the federal government in the context of the Great Depression. The interviews were conducted with elderly people who had been freed at a young age, and more than seventy years had passed since emancipation. Nevertheless, the interviews provide great detail on family life and work under slavery, relationships with enslavers and overseers, experiences in the Civil War, and what life was like after freedom. Despite the debates over some of the challenges of the source set, they remain the cornerstone of the majority of studies of the enslaved experience.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) E History America > E151 United States (General)
Divisions:	Humanities & Social Science
Publisher:	Routledge
Date Deposited:	27 Apr 2021 10:31
Last Modified:	03 Sep 2021 23:16
Editors:	Lockley, T and West, E
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/14853

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