Tongues united

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation is a book-and-audiotape collection of actual conversations with men and women who lived, loved and worked in bondage to make the "freedom time" transition into the 20th century. The original recordings were produced by the 1930s Federal Writer's Project (readers may already be familiar with writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of many hired to help collect these accounts) and have been housed at the Library of Congress.

A timely collaboration with noted scholars and Smithsonian Productions (which remastered the recordings) engendered this unique set, which recalled …