HIST 339 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Slave Narrative
Document Summary
There are more than 6,000 works that are generally labeled as slave narratives. These include testimonies and court cases, not purely book stories. They also appear in church records and in the wpa slave narratives (taken during the great. Many of these narratives (esp the longer ones) include some type of voucher to the author"s legitimacy and credibility. These narratives often presented as fact during the antebellum period and were best sellers. By the end of reconstruction, these narratives are almost possible to obtain and will be rediscovered much later. Since the purpose of these books was so closely wedded to encouraging people to abolish slavery, in the wake of emancipation there was much less reason for them to have continued as sensational after the civil war. The students list: rape, submissive, non-women, domestic, motherhood, matriarch. Every women"s slave narrative has the danger or lurking fear of rape in a way that you don"t see of enslaved men.
