Although there are several slave narratives from as early as the mid-eighteenth century and some that extend into the early decades of the twentieth century, this literary genre reached the peak of its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. These firsthand accounts discuss a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to, life under slavery, relations among slaves, interactions with white masters and overseers, abolitionism, rebellion, and resistance. Written and dictated by American slaves, slave narratives recount the bondmen and bondwomen's struggles from slavery to freedom. Removed from the experience of slavery and incapable of ever looking at the world from the point of view of the enslaved, scholars of American history have relied on slave testimony, such as slave narratives, to represent the experience and impact of slavery. A free man "cannot see things in the same light with the slave, because he does not, and cannot, look from the same point from which the slave does," argued Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (2003, p.
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