Scholars have continued to search for and authenticate texts to be added to the canon of autobiographical slave narratives: the historian Jean Fagan Yellin, for instance, published an authenticated 'enlarged edition' of Harriet Jacobs' narrative in 1987, until which time most historians had considered it a fictional account (Jacobs and Yellin, 2009); the literary scholar William Andrews has been the most prolific in terms of finding and compiling book and articlelength testimonies by the formerly enslaved and has now made the fruits of his ongoing labours available online (Andrews, 1998); and more recently, the historian David Blight discovered and authenticated two unpublished Civil War period narratives previously unavailable to scholars (Blight, 2007). ${ }^{3}$  
The narratives of formerly enslaved persons collected by the FWP, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, reflect the times in which they were produced: the late 1930s, when the South was still segregated and African Americans were regularly threatened with violence. The interviewers sent by the FWP to small towns and cities in search of the survivors of slavery were mostly white and those that they interviewed were elderly and reluctant to speak in detail about  
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[^0]:    3 For online access to hundreds of published narratives, see the 'North American slave narratives' collection at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/  
the abuses that they had suffered; and some, as the transcripts make clear, also believed the interviewers to have some control over the government assistance that they received. The fact that many had only been children at the time of the Civil War has been considered by some scholars a weakness in terms of the value of the FWP narratives as a source for studies of slavery. What is more, there were no standardized questions, so while some chose to write up their work as a set of brief narratives, others transcribed the conversations in a dialect that smacked of racism.