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DocSouth Collections
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture. These are arranged below in alphabetical order. Click on any collection to access an index of materials limited to that collection. To view an index of all materials in this digital library choose "Authors," "Titles," or "Subjects" from the navigation bar at the top of this page. Some materials are cross-referenced in multiple collections.
African American women singers
"The Church in the Southern Black Community" traces the way Southern African Americans adopted and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.
Portrait of Southern Americans
"The Civil War Day By Day" draws on the vast holdings of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library's Civil War documents.The concept of the project was a simple one: relevant documents associated with each day of the conflict were featured on the project's blog, where they can now be discovered by keyword search or browse options.
Governor Tryon and the Regulators
"The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina" includes documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina's settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution.
Commemorative Landscapes
"Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina" documents the state's history through a spatially based presentation of commemorative monuments, shrines, and public art. It enables users to visualize and analyze the historical memory of the state of North Carolina by viewing the commemorative sites on modern and historic maps.
Blue Ridge Parkway
"Driving through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina" features historic maps, photographs, postcards, government documents, oral history interviews, and newspaper clippings that document the development and impact of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the most visited site in the National Park system.
Detail of a silhouette of the early UNC campus
"The First Century of the First State University" presents hundreds of primary documents about the creation and development of the University of North Carolina, from 1776 to 1875. Scholarly essays and annotations about people and places provide rich historical and contextual information.
A Southern Girl in '61
"First-Person Narratives of the American South" offers many Southerners' perspectives on their lives by presenting letters, memoirs, autobiographies and other writings by slaves, laborers, women, aristocrats, soldiers, and officers.
Mortar and Pestle
"The James Lawrence Dusenbery Journal (1841-1842)" chronicles Dusenbery's senior year at the University of North Carolina. Additional manuscripts, images, music, and essays extend the journal by documenting Dusenbery's family and subsequent medical education, as well as the daily life and literary and musical tastes of his mid-nineteenth-century classmates.
Couples Dancing
"Library of Southern Literature" includes the most important Southern literary works from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century. This collection presents the varied and rich foundation of Southern writing.
Frederick Douglass
"North American Slave Narratives" documents the individual and collective story of African Americans' struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Cotton
"The North Carolina Experience" includes representative histories, personal narratives, descriptive accounts, institutional reports, fiction, and other published writings to help users gain greater insight into the diverse social, economic, religious, and political history of North Carolina.
map
"North Carolina Maps" presents historic maps from three of the state's largest map collections: the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center. The maps range in date from the late 1500s to 2000, and include at least one map for each of North Carolina's one hundred counties.
WWI soldier
"North Carolinians and the Great War" examines how World War I shaped the lives of different North Carolinians on the battlefield and on the homefront. Propaganda posters and related documents show the way the state and federal governments responded to war-time demands.
An oral history interview being conducted
"Oral Histories of the American South" is a collection of over 500 oral history interviews with a southern focus on a variety of topics, including civil rights, politics, and women's issues. Interviews can be read in text transcript form, listened to with a media player, or both simultaneously.
Confederate Money
"The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865" presents materials related to Southern life during the Civil War and the challenge of creating a nation state while waging war. This collection includes government documents, personal diaries, religious pamphlets, and many other materials.
Thomas E. Watson
"Thomas E. Watson Papers" presents the correspondence, book manuscripts, speeches, publications, scrapbooks, diaries, photographs, and photograph albums of Thomas E. Watson, a lawyer, populist politician, popular author, and influential publisher. The collection contains more than 12,300 items comprised of more than 45,000 individual images.
The Old Well in front of South Building
"True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina" presents 121 edited and transcribed primary documents from 1795 to 1868. Most of these documents were written by students and tell the story of the University of North Carolina from their perspective.