Modern scholars continue to mine the narratives of the formerly enslaved for information on a multitude of topics ranging from the various labour and resistance strategies of the enslaved to the workings of the domestic slave trade and how it affected enslaved families; the ways in which gender and age shaped the enslaved person's experience; the creation of local and long-distance information networks among the enslaved; the persistence of cultural forms and  
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[^0]:    4 Available on the American Memory website at: https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html  
how they have evolved among Africans and their descendants; and even the transformation of cotton cultivation technologies and how the expansion of the cotton industry affected daily life in the South. Without the determination of the formerly enslaved to tell their stories, the narratives would not have existed and we would know far less about the history of American racial slavery, in particular its role in the economic, political and cultural development of the United States.