African American History at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress’ American Memory project features digital collections in almost 20 subject areas. One of these is African American History. Within this find African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920; Slave Narratives, audio interviews from 1932-1975, where former slaves tell their stories; and the Slave Narratives, Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.