 Relying also on 19th-century autobiographies of ex-slaves (known as slave narratives) and the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, a set of interviews conducted with former slaves in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, historians described slavery as the slaves remembered it.Far from slaves' being strictly victims or content, historians showed slaves as both resilient and autonomous in many of their activities.Despite their exercise of autonomy and their efforts to make a life within slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the slave's situation.