A Comprehensive Name Index for The American Slave

(Hardback)

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Description

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration began interviewing former slaves for their side of history, a project that would become one of the largest oral research projects on slavery. Forty years later, George P. Rawick compiled the thousands of interviews into the multi-volume series The American Slave. Published by Greenwood Press in the 1970s, the slave narratives have provided a valuable resource for historians and researchers, but they lacked a comprehensive name index. This volume indexes the slaves according to where they lived (as opposed to where they were interviewed), enabling researchers to locate slaves by state, county, or region, as well as by their master's name, their age, and the interviewer. The ease of access provided by this index will aid researchers who wish to consider the slave experience in specific states or regions. It will help scholars trace migratory patterns from one region to another and enable genealogical researchers to locate specific individuals.

Reviews

Potts has done a praiseworthy job of cross-referencing the immense amounts of data in ways valuable to scholars. There is a county and state index, a narrator index, and master (slave owner) index, an interviewer index, and a narrator birth year index. The indexes are easy to read and make it only a few minutes' work to look up an ancestor or a region to see whether pertinent information exists. This work will become necessary to anyone using the Rawick series. The amount of nongenealogical information in these interviews is astounding.-Choice
"Potts has done a praiseworthy job of cross-referencing the immense amounts of data in ways valuable to scholars. There is a county and state index, a narrator index, and master (slave owner) index, an interviewer index, and a narrator birth year index. The indexes are easy to read and make it only a few minutes' work to look up an ancestor or a region to see whether pertinent information exists. This work will become necessary to anyone using the Rawick series. The amount of nongenealogical information in these interviews is astounding."-Choice

Author Bio

HOWARD E. POTTS is an Instructor of Political Science and History at Waycross College in Georgia. He is currently compiling stories from The American Slave to complete a novel on slavery.