|
Web Sites
Concerning the
American South |
"Difficulty is the excuse history never
accepts."
Edward
R. Murrow
Documenting the American South
Sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, DAS is "a collection of sources on
Southern
history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the
first
decades of the 20th century." More than 1,000 books and manuscripts
dealing
with slavery, literature, education, and religion in the South are
divided
into categories that include: First-Person Narratives of the American
South;
Library of Southern Literature; North American Slave Narratives; The
Southern
Homefront, 1861-1865; The Church in the Southern Black Community; and
The
North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940.
Southern
Oral History Program
Also housed at the University of North Carolina, the Southern
Oral History Program is "committed to preserving the voices and
perspectives of everyday people." The site holds more than 2900
interviews with people from all walks of life.There are also
transcripts of the interviews .
First Person Narratives of the American
South, 1860 - 1920
A wide variety of primary documents provide insight into Southerns
viewpoints about the American South. "It includes the diaries,
autobiographies,
memoirs, travel
accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent
individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women,
African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans." There
are also forty first-person narratives, many published before 1860
Race
and Place
Maintained by the Virginia Center for Digital History, this multimedia
site seeks "to connect race with place" with its collection of
oral
histories, political broadsides, photographs, maps, and letters.The
focus
is on segregated Charlottesville, Virginia, from the late 1880s until
the
mid 1900s. Of particular interest are the two African-American
owned
newspapers from the period.