There is a moment in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” when the narrator arrives in New York City and is amazed by what he perceives as the unlimited freedom enjoyed by the city’s Black ...

More than 2,000 first-person accounts of slavery in America have been digitized and compiled for a collection that is now available online on the Library of Congress website. “Born in Slavery: Slave ...

Tracing the tangled lives of two Black Cape Girardeau men named George Bollinger, from WPA slave narratives to death records ...

In the past we have advised you to take advantage of holiday gatherings and the summer-reunion season to collect information from your relatives about family history. Get your kin talking, pull out a ...

Gloria Feimster, a 92-year-old Raleigh native, told WRAL News she discovered part of her grandmother’s story lives in the Library of Congress. Her grandmother, Emma Blalock, was interviewed in 1937 ...

“Reading slave narratives, you’re experiencing the lives of people who are cut off from participation in their society, who did not have full citizenship. It allows us to view what society will be ...

Long-time academic researcher and consultant Sheila Smith McKoy first read the 1868 memoir of Hillsborough resident Elizabeth Keckley when she was an undergraduate English student at N.C. State ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Kari Winter, PhD, a University at Buffalo professor of global gender and sexuality studies, is writing a screenplay for a four-part television miniseries that she hopes will bring the ...

The project goal: ID every person enslaved before 1865 in the present-day U.S. ABC News reporter Alex Presha sits down with "10 Million Names" historians Dr. Kendra Field and Dr. Vincent Brown to ...

His account of bondage in Edenton described men flogged 100 times and doused with brandy to increase the pain, and white owners so cruel they whipped other people’s slaves for failing to tip their ...

What ghost stories of the formerly enslaved tell us about their lives. By Jennifer Wilson In 1937, workers with the Federal Writers’ Project (F.W.P.), a New Deal program for unemployed writers, were ...

Harriet Jacobs endured seven years of hiding in an attic crawl space in order to escape the terror and misery of her life as a slave. "I lived in that little dismal ...