![]() | Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow Subjects: African Americans -- Social conditions -- Historiography; African Americans -- Segregation -- Historiography; Race discrimination -- United States -- Historiography; Autobiography -- African American authors; African Americans -- Biography -- History and; Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre's possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright. JENNIFER JENSEN WALLACH is an assistant professor of history at Georgia College and State University. She has also taught at Stonehill College. |
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