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Title Homeless, friendless, and penniless : the WPA interviews with former slaves living in Indiana / [compiled by] Ronald L. Baker
Published Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ©2000

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Description 1 online resource (xx, 341 pages) : illustrations
Summary Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless The WPA Interviews with Former Slaves Living in Indiana Ronald L. Baker Lives of former slaves in their own words, published for the first time. Based on a collection of interviews conducted in the late 1930s, Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless is an invaluable record of the lives and thoughts of former slaves who moved to Indiana after the Civil War and made significant contributions to the evolving patchwork of Hoosier culture. The Indiana slave narratives provide a glimpse of slavery as remembered by those who experienced it, preserving insiders' views of a tragic chapter in American history. Though they were living in Indiana at the time of the interviews, these African Americans been enslaved in 11 different states from the Carolinas to Louisiana. The interviews deal with life and work on the plantation; the treatment of slaves; escaping from slavery; education, religion, and slave folklore; and recollections of the Civil War. Just as important, the interviews reveal how former slaves fared in Indiana after the Civil War and during the Depression. Some became ministers, a few became educators, and one became a physician; but many lived in poverty and survived on Christian faith and small government pensions. Ronald L. Baker, Chairperson and Professor of English at Indiana State University, is author of many books, including Hoosier Folk Legends and From Needmore to Prosperity: Hoosier Place Names in Folklore and History (both from Indiana University Press. He is co-author of Indiana Place Names with Marvin Carmony and editor of The Folklore Historian, the journal of the Folklore and History Section of the American Folklore Society. Contents Part One: A Folk History of Slavery Background of the WPA Interviews Presentation of Material Living and Working on the Plantation The Treatment of Slaves Escaping from Slavery Education Religion Folklore Recoll
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-325) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Enslaved persons -- Indiana -- Interviews
Enslaved persons -- Southern States -- Social conditions -- Sources
Plantation life -- Southern States -- History -- Sources
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Historical.
HISTORY -- United States -- State & Local -- South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Folklore & Mythology.
Plantation life
Enslaved persons
Enslaved persons -- Social conditions
Vrijgelaten slaven.
Plantages.
Indiana
Southern States
Genre/Form History
Interviews
Sources
Form Electronic book
Author Baker, Ronald L., 1937-
Federal Writers' Project.
LC no. 00032004
ISBN 9780253028570
0253028574