Slavery in America
at the Time of the Civil War

"From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief."

From: American Slave Narratives
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html

Our students each chose a person to study, read the interview and using the primary source interview, combined secondary readings and personal reflections to create an Inspiration web about Slavery in America at the time of the Civil War, considering both the person's life and the issues of the time.