Ok I'll admit this is something of a 'hot topic' with me at the moment, but this is because I'm becoming acutely aware that something I always thought of as a eighteenth/ ninetenth century phenomenom seems never to have left us, and is still present, albeit in a different form perhaps, but also that the history of the subject seems to be continually re-written by different sets of spin doctors.

I've just been listening to a BBC radio 4 pogramme on the subject of a slave burial discovered in New York.

Acclaimed writer Caryl Phillips uses startling new evidence from a huge slave burial site discovered in New York City to expose the extent of slavery in both the Northern and Southern parts of the United States. The human remains discovered during routine building work in Manhattan explode the idea of slavery as a largely "Southern" phenomenon.

This Archive Hour also draws on oral archive of the last people to be born into slavery in the American South and contrasts their experiences with surprising new detail about the lives of their Northern counterparts

You can hear the programme again on the BBC website.   

I was particularly struck by the extracts from the 'Oral Archive' Does anyone know if you can get access to these archives via net?
How come we don't hear more of these particularly in view of their historical significance?

Maybe I'm a little idealistic, I have always considered folk music and stories as being the voice of the disposessed, and a channel, through the oral tradition, for the history that never makes the school text books.

Seems I'm not hearing enough, or maybe it's just the wrong songs?


SM