Related Resources

Documenting the American South

First-Person Narratives of the American South is one component of a growing collection of texts illustrating Southern history, literature, and culture. Other components include:

• North American Slave Narratives
• Library of Southern Literature
• The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865

A new segment, The Church in the Southern Black Community is a 1998/99 Award Winner of the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. Work on digitizing the 100 texts in this collection began in Fall 1999.

Several American Memory collections include first-person accounts of life in other regions of the United States and in other periods:

"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

Full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts covering the decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century.

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910

A portrait of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's collections.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940

Based on interviews by staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project, this collection includes almost 3,000 drafts and revisions, varying in form from narrative to dialogue to report to case history. The histories describe the family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations of interviewees from twenty-four states.