History 371 - SEM: WPA SLAVE INTERVIEWS

Topics course: Despite the particular degradation, violence and despair of enslavement in the United States, African American men and women built families, traditions and a legacy of resistance. Using the WPA interviews—part of the New Deal Federal Writers Project of the 1930s—this course looks at the historical memory of former slaves by reading and listening to their own words. How did 70- through 90-year-old former slaves remember their childhoods and young adulthoods during slavery? And how do scholars make sense of these interviews given they were conducted when Jim Crow segregation was at its pinnacle? The course examines the WPA interviews as historical sources by studying scholarship that relies heavily on them. Most importantly, students explore debates that swirl around the interviews and challenge their validity on multiple fronts, even as they remain the richest sources of African American oral history regarding slavery. Students write an original research paper using the WPA interviews a

Limited to juniors, seniors.