Documenting the American South Logo
Collections >> True and Candid Compositions
True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina

"True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina" presents 121 edited documents written primarily by students attending the University of North Carolina between 1795, the year in which the institution opened its doors, and 1868, when the devastation of the Civil War closed them for a semester. The documents provide important first-person accounts of how antebellum University of North Carolina students lived and worked and are drawn from three special collections of the University Library: the Southern Historical Collection, the University Archives, and the North Carolina Collection. Each document is accompanied by a digitized image of the original source. The manuscript materials have been transcribed, edited, and annotated by Professor Erika Lindemann, who also has written several essays that provide editorial, historical, and contextual information for understanding the documents. Among the topics treated in these essays are the establishment of the University, student discipline and faculty authority, the purposes of a university education in the antebellum period, the daily lives of students, the role of slaves and servants, the students' academic writing, their work in the debating societies, and their responses to the Civil War.

The "True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina" collection was made possible by a Library Services and Technology Act grant distributed through the State Library of North Carolina.