(Her best known works were "Dust Tracks on a Road," her autobiography, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God," but perhaps her biggest contributions come from her entire body of work -- plays, stories, articles, books -- which amounts to a lifelong study of folklore in the African-American South. )

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(I don't know why this cracks me up so much. This document, obviously, marked the beginning of the end of Black slavery in America. What we now know is that Lincoln didn't free the slaves because he was some great man who believed in equality or who hated the actual practice; he freed them because the North needed more bodies to fight in the Civil War. But unfortunately, average people like me will ever get to see what the document actually says because it's vulnerable to light. So I guess we'll always be in the dark. That just cracks me up. All we get is a transcription, and it's anyone's guess if the transcription is accurate or if it was tuned to fit some political motive, like, you know, propaganda. Lincoln was assassinated, so only he knows the ultimate truth about what he wrote. We're left with someone else's interpretation.

Related:
Emancipation Proclamation: A Transcription (National Archives) )

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