Social Studies

Part of UNC-Chapel-Hill's Documenting the American South site, the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina site has been an extraordinary resource for students of North Carolina's history for over one hundred years. The series 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.

This site, sponsored by the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Most of its texts and materials come primarily from the University Library's Southern holdings. Browse under the "Collections" link to see the thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, slave narratives, and songs.

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Examines the American Civil War through the eyes of two communities--one Union and one Confederate--from the time of John Brown's raid through the era of Reconstruction. This digital archive contains thousands of primary sources from both communities, including original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, and census and church records in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

ArchiveGrid is a searchable catalog of archival materials (including historical documents, personal papers, and family histories) held by public and private libraries, museums, and archives. Thousands of institutions have contributed nearly a million collection descriptions to ArchiveGrid. Researchers searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies.

In the days immediately following September 11, 2001, the Social Science Research Council invited a wide range of leading social scientists from around the world to write short essays for an online forum, "After September 11." Written against two-week deadlines when it was difficult to come by sure knowledge in a time of quickly changing circumstances, the forum's essays would be downloaded millions of times and used extensively by teachers and journalists. A decade later, contributors to the original forum were asked to reflect on what they wrote and to explore what has changed and what remains the same since those harrowing times. The result is this extraordinary digital collection of new essays, "10 Years after September 11." Short and written in a style that is accessible to both academic and non-academic readers, the essays offer deep, expert analysis of developments since 9/11 from the perspectives of the social sciences.

Includes over 154,000 full-text pages of both previously published and unpublished letters and diaries of North American women from 1675 to 1950, the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled.

Part of UNC-Chapel-Hill's Documenting the American South site, "First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners and offering personal accounts of Southern life between 1860 and 1920. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. "First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920" was a 1996/97 Award Winner in The Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. This award funded the digitization of 101 texts.

This site, the final phase of the Race and Slavery Petitions project, offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents containing detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions (covering the years 1775-1867) from fifteen states and the District of Columbia, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners. The general topics include slave ownership, slave management, freedom suits, crime and punishment, health, death, social and civic life, marriage, women, and family, among others. The site is searchable by name and petition, as well as browsable by subject.

Part of UNC-Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South site, "North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

Part of UNC-Chapel-Hill's Documenting the American South site, "First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners and offering personal accounts of Southern life between 1860 and 1920. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. "First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920" was a 1996/97 Award Winner in The Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. This award funded the digitization of 101 texts.

This HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.