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HS 217 - Lowcountry & Gullah Culture

This library page will assist student investigation of the cultural history of a people and a region: the Gullah and the Lowcountry, respectively. We will learn through arts, the landscape, folk tales, music, agricultural history, food ways and material c

What is a Primary Source?

Primary Sources are: "Materials produced by people or groups directly involved in the event or topic under consideration, either as participants or as witnesses." - Mary Lynn Rampolla. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History  (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010), 6-7.

Possible examples:

Written Documents

  • Letters
  • Diaries
  • Newspapers / Magazine articles
  • speeches
  • Autobiographies
  • census data
  • marriage, birth and death registers

Other Documents

  • Works of art
  • Films
  • Recordings
  • Clothing
  • Household objects
  • Archeological remains
  • Oral sources (Interviews).

Primary Sources

  • American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1940
    • "This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents vary in form from narratives to dialogues to reports to case histories. They chronicle vivid life stories of Americans who lived at the turn of the century and include tales of meeting Billy the Kid, surviving the 1871 Chicago fire, pioneer journeys out West, grueling factory work, and the immigrant experience. Writers hired by this Depression-era work project included Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, May Swenson, and many others. The documents often describe the informant’s physical appearance, family, education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores. "
  • Archive.org
  • Association for Cultural Equity
    • "Inspired by the example set by Alan Lomax, our mission is to stimulate cultural equity through preservation, research, and dissemination of the world's traditional music, and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage."
  • Lowcountry Digital Library
    • "Produces digital collections and projects that support research about the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and historically interconnected sites in the Atlantic World.  "
  • Lowmax Digital Archive - Field Work South Carolina 1934-1940
    • Recordings made between 1934 and 1940 by John A. Lomax. Lomax visited South Carolina several times as a guest of folklorist Genevieve W. Chandler in Murrells Inlet, who introduced her to some of the renowned singers in the Gullah community there: among them Zackie Knox, Lillie Knox, and Hagar ("Mom Hagar") Brown. Additionally representing Gullah traditions of the region in these recordings are Caesar Roper and the Wadmalaw Island singers who participated in Rosa Warren Wilson's "Plantation Echoes" program, which Lomax recorded in Columbia in 1937. White singers also contributed during the sessions at Chandler's home with children's songs, contemporary hillbilly numbers, and ballads. Lomax recorded incarcerated men and women at the Reid Farm in rural Kershaw County and at the state penitentiary in Columbia, singing group work songs, sacred pieces, and the occasional blues..."
  • Margaretta Childs Archive
    • "At the core of Historic Charleston Foundation's archival collection is the “Property Record Collection,” which provides information about the history and architecture of houses, buildings, and plantations in Charleston and the Lowcountry."
  • Private Voices
    • "Private Voices is the offspring of the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project, an effort to amass a large number of letters penned by individuals with limited educations who knew little about formal conventions of punctuation and capitalization. "
  • University of North Carolina's Race and Slavery Petition Project
    • "Offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Project contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners."

Newspapers

Slave Songs of the United States

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938