Public Domain Book Selections during the Corona Virus Pandemic
- June 16, 2020 - Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New York Kidnapped In Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 From A Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana by Solomon Northrop (1853) - download from Project Gutenberg
- The Slave Narrative - Narratives by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era are essential to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history and literature, especially as they relate to the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, an area that included approximately one third of the population of the United States at the time when slave narratives were most widely read. As historical sources, slave narratives document slave life primarily in the American South from the invaluable perspective of first-hand experience. Increasingly in the 1840s and 1850s they reveal the struggles of people of color in the North, as fugitives from the South recorded the disparities between America's ideal of freedom and the reality of racism in the so-called "free states." After the Civil War, former slaves continued to record their experiences under slavery, partly to ensure that the newly-united nation did not forget what had threatened its existence, and partly to affirm the dedication of the ex-slave population to social and economic progress. | WPA project - Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
Examples of slave narratives:
- Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New York Kidnapped In Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 From A Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana by Solomon Northrop (1853)
free download
- Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself by Harriet A. Jacobs - free Project Gutenberg download
- Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft - free Project Gutenberg download
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Douglass - free Project Gutenberg download
- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa,The African, Written by Himself - Olaudah Equiano - free Project Gutenberg download
- The Underground Railroad by William Still - free Project Gutenberg download
- Narrative of the Life of Henry "Box" Brown - narrative
- The White Indian Captive Narrative - Texas State Historical Association
- Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture at the Massacre of the Inmates of Parker's Fort by James T. DeShields - download - Cynthia Ann Parker
- Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson - by Mary White Rowlandson - free Project Gutenberg download
