Friday, March 8, 2002

A Web Site at the U. of North Carolina Collects First-Person Accounts of the American South By BROCK READ Through an online project, librarians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are making primary-source accounts of the southern United States' checkered history available to academics and the general public. Drawing from the libraries at Chapel Hill and several other universities in North Carolina, the compilers of the project, called Documenting the American South, have now posted 1,000 documents depicting slavery, literature, education, and religion in the South through the words of the people who experienced them. Documenting the American South got its start six years ago, when Chapel Hill librarians digitized a handful of documents written by black slaves before the Civil War. Since its founding, the site has grown considerably, expanding to include digitized collections of renowned Southern literature, catechisms and other documents from black churches in the South, manuscripts and currency from the Confederate period, and examples of fiction, textbooks, and other documents reflecting the experiences of Southerners. One of six chapters on the site is what Joe Hewitt, North Carolina's associate provost for university libraries, calls "our signature project": a collection whose goal is to gather all North American slave narratives published in English in books and pamphlets up to 1920. At present, more than 230 works are available online -- some from famous names like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, others from obscure figures. The collection of slave narratives is overseen by William L. Andrews, a professor of English who has made African-American autobiography his specialty. He scoured college archives across the United States to create a comprehensive bibliography for To Tell a Free Story (University of Illinois Press, 1986), his book about African-American autobiography. His list of texts -- "the most complete bibliography of slave narratives in existence," he says -- serves as the basis for the online archive. Mr. Andrews says that visitors to the Web site have told him about the existence of additional slave narratives. One such document is a rare narrative from the turn of the 20th century. Almost all copies of the book were lost in a warehouse fire, but one family retained a copy and contacted Mr. Andrews. It is now being digitized so it can be added to the online collection. Financial support for the project has come from a variety of sources, including the Library of Congress, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Ameritech, a communications company. On a typical day, Mr. Hewitt says, Documenting the American South receives about 150,000 visitors, and 4,000 to 6,000 of them spend significant time reading the texts. According to Mr. Hewitt, only a quarter of the readers are scholars. The rest are primary- and secondary-school students, educators, or members of the general public. Susan C. Imbarrato, an assistant professor of English at Minnesota State University at Moorhead, uses the site as a resource for a course she teaches on slave narratives. She says the archive is especially useful to her students because it allows them to see images of actual documents and artifacts. "It's very helpful for them to have a sense of material culture, whether it's slave irons or Southern architecture," she says. For Mr. Andrews, though, feedback from the general public is the best testimonial to the site's importance. "I've read very moving messages from people who are not professional scholars or students," he says, including administrators at Southern churches, high-school teachers, and even a Nigerian graduate student hoping to build a black-history monument in his nation's capital. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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