US slavery, civil war, and the emancipation of enslaved mothers

‘Dere never wuz a war like dis war’: The WPA Narratives and the Emotional Echoes of the Civil War

“…In that article, Schwalm urged historians to expand their history of the war beyond the battlefield, both in terms of the treatment of Black refugees and the broader impact on civilians, and in terms of the specific experiences of enslaved mothers. 9 But we can go further than that and extend the battlefield and the dangerous roads to freedom into the twentieth century and into the emotional resonance of the war as we hear it in the WPA Narratives, expanding the 'new periodization' that Yael Sternhell identifies in recent scholarship's blurring of the 'chronological division between slavery and freedom'. 10 Indeed, it is crucial that we do so, because the complex range of emotions that we encounter in the WPA Narrativesanger, humiliation, fear, love, sadness, for exampleare rarely discussed in relation to enslavement and its long-term impact in the various studies devoted to America's historically changing emotional landscape.…”