Uncle Remus and Bre'r Rabbit Week 14: American Tales - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images

Resources

You can read selections from Harris's Uncle Remus tales, with commentary and illustrations at this University of Virginia Uncle Remus site (which also features a biography of Harris, editorial prefaces to the early editions, and contemporary reviews).

The UncleRemus.com website is another place where you can comfortably read 35 of the stories online with illustrations, from "Legends of the Old Plantation", copyright 1881, the first Uncle Remus collection. There is also commentary and analysis for some of the stories.

Joel Chandler Harris's Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) is also available online.

There are many Harris articles in the Cornell University "Making of America" Project.

There is a fascinating chapter on the Brer Rabbit tales and Bantu traditions from Africa in Alice Werner's Myths and Legends of the Bantus (1933).

Snopes.com has a good account of the Song of the South Controversy.

You can consult a list of Images from Harris Publications available at Cornell's Making of America Project (including scans from Scribner's Monthly magazine of 1880).

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an African-American author writing at much the same time as Harris: the Goophered Grapevine, Po' Sandy, and other Charles Chesnutt stories are available online. For a quite different representative of African American writing in the 19th century, take a look at the poetry of Paul Dunbar.

For minstrel shows and other aspects of 19th-century American slave culture, you can find a lot of information at the University of Virginia's site for Uncle Tom's Cabin. You will also find useful materials at the UVA's Relations of Race course.

The Library of Congress has published some photographic images of slaves. Some of these images are available has highly detailed .tiff files which allow you to look at the photograph as if under a magnifying glass. There is also a Library of Congress: Frederick Douglass website.

You can buy a complete collection of Joel Chandler Harris's Complete Uncle Remus (875 pages!) at amazon.com.