Dec 20 2011
∞
“ The result, as the historian Lawrence W. Levine has written, ‘is a mélange of accuracy & fantasy, of sensitivity & stereotype, of empathy & racism’ that may sometimes be offensive to today’s readers. Yet whatever else they may be, the representations of speech in the narratives are a pervasive & forceful reminder that these documents are not only a record of a time that was already history when they were created: they are themselves irreducibly historical, the products of a particular time & particular places…
— 19th-century American Women: Ex-Slave Ellen Butler’s Christmas Memories - an addendum, quoted from the Library of Congress’s site, about the language of recorded interviews held with former slaves.
