HIS 201: American History to 1877

An indexed collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. Includes material from Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill online collections documenting Southern life during the Civil War.

This collection contains high-quality scans of archival materials from the University of North Carolina Southern Historical Collection. Materials include family papers, diaries, letters, and account books.

Library of Congress web guide to primary document collections for American history 1775-1872. A wealth of documents and primary source material.

The valley project details life in two American communities, on Northern and one Southern, fro the time of John Browns Raid through the Era of Reconstruction.

A listing of African American related web sites compiled by the University Libraries at the University of Washington.

Overview of materials in the Library of Congress about the African American experience covering the nearly 500 years of the black experience in the Western hemisphere. Includes books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound.

A list of guides for online archival collections from the Special Collections Library at Duke University.

Digital Schomburg at the New York Public Library.

From Project Avalon at Yale University Law School.

Online diaries and letters from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine).

American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later.

Ever-expanding Historical Collections from the National Digital Library, are taken from the Library of Congress special collections and consist of primary source and archival materials relating to US history and culture. [Reviewed] 

The Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his own freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. Searchable by keyword or ser

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Fede

This resource comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920.

During the late 1930s writers of the Works Progress Administration, interviewed thousands of former slaves throughout the American south. This Web site offers annotated transcripts of selected interviews with commentary on their research value and explana

Materials from the Virginia Military Institute Archives.

Over 981 books and manuscripts on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. Organized into the the following projects:

Documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights. Will eventually contain all the narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in English up to 1920.

Letters from Newton Robert Scott, Private, Company A, of the 36th Infantry, Iowa Volunteers to friend Hannah Cone describing his war experiences.

An ongoing digital library of primary sources in US social history (1850-77) created in cooperation with Cornell University and supported by the Mellon Foundation. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Keeper of United States historical documents and records.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill online collections documenting the struggle of African Americans for freedom and human rights.

This collection of documents from The Avalon Project (Yale Law School) contains a broad array of documents relating to the historical roots of the Constitution, its original drafting, debates and revisions, and state ratification.

A local archive of primary source documents that may be worth a visit.

A collection of original writings of 49 voyagers on Mormon, California, Oregon and Montana trails who wrote while traveling on the trail.

Listing of over 5,000 websites with holdings descriptions of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs and other primary sources

Digital library containing primary and secondary sources in the history of British Isles.

Catalog containing the materials collected at the Library Company of Philadelphia and other libraries. Materials include rare books, broadsides, pamphlets, wood cuts, lithographs, and maps.

Images from The William W. Cole Collection exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society.