Documenting the American South: Primary Resources for the Study of Southern History, Literature, and Culture, University of North Carolina Library (http://docsouth.unc.edu)
Documenting the American South is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
Freedmen's Bureau Online: Records of the the Reconstruction-era Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau), established by the War Department in 1865 to supervise all relief and educational activities related to the freedmen of the southern states, including issues rations, clothing and medicine. The Bureau also assumed custody of confiscated lands or property in the former Confederate States, border states, District of Columbia, and Indian Territory, and registered marriages. (http://www.freedmensbureau.com)
The bureau records were created or maintained by bureau headquarters, the assistant commissioners and the state superintendents of education and included personnel records and a variety of standard reports concerning bureau programs and conditions in the states.
Historical Census Browser: detailed and searchable national-, state-, and county-level data from the United States census, 1790-1960. (http//:fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/)
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers from Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, and the District of Columbia, 1900-1910.
The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, University of Virginia: this site details two communities, one northern and one southern, from the years just before the outbreak of war through Reconstruction through local newspapers, diaries, correspondence, military records, and government reports.
This digital archive of primary sources documents the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.
The Valley of the Shadow is different than many other history websites. It is more like a library than a single book. There is no "one" story in the Valley Project. Rather, what you'll find are thousands of letters and diaries, census and government records, newspapers and speeches, all of which record different aspects of daily life in these two counties at the time of the Civil War. As you explore the extensive archive and you'll find that you can flip through a Valley resident's Civil War diary, read what the county newspapers reported about the battle of Gettysburg, or even search the census records to see how much the average citizen owned in 1860 or 1870.
Civil Rights Documentation Project, As valuable as the emphasis on the civil rights movement has been, an equally vital chapter has been neglected -- the story of the legislative process itself. The Civil Rights Documentation Project provides a fuller accounting of law-making based on the unique archival resources housed at The Dirksen Congressional Center -- http://www.dirksencenter.org -- including the collection of then-Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL), widely credited with securing the passage of the bills.
Intended to serve the needs of teachers and students, The Civil Rights Documentation Project demonstrates that Congress is capable of converting big ideas into powerful law, that citizen engagement is essential to that process, and that the public policies produced forty years ago continue to influence our lives.
The project takes the form of an interactive, Web-based presentation with links to more than 100 digitized historical materials and other Internet-based resources about civil rights legislation created by museums, historical societies, and government agencies. We hope to provide resources teachers can use to create lesson plans and materials to supplement their teaching of the legislative process, of recent American history, and of the civil rights movement, among other social studies topics.
Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845-1917, an innovative tool for examining plantation economy and agrarian society in the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns and additional census records, Documenting Louisiana Sugar makes available two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and macro detail the evolution of one of America's definitive plantation crops, namely cane sugar. It enables users to study the economic performance of an entire industry, to consider business consolidation, capital acquisition, technology transfer, and the shifting dynamics of plantation land use. The built in search functions enable researchers to limit or expand their enquiries by year, parish, crop output, technology, and even gender. Users can track persistence and change among the plantation elite, trace landholding and economic performance among both large and small cane farmers, examine the effect of the American Civil War, and assess the transition from slave to free labor on Louisiana's plantation economy. And for those interested in the late nineteenth century, the databases track the rise and fall of American sugar during U.S. imperial expansion.
Commonwealth College Fortnightly, 1926-1938, the newspaper of Commonwealth College, a university located first in Louisiana and then in Arkansas that promoted labor education and especially the training of future labor leaders. The newspaper is now available on the University of Arkansas Special Collections library website.
After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas
Southern Spaces: An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the U. S. South and their global connections