U.S. Civil War Resources

Guides for US Civil War Research

Starting Points

Resources for Learning About the American Civil War, 1861-1865

This guide lists selected books from Randall Library's collection on aspects of the Civil War, along with subject headings that will need to additional resources.

Randall Library - Special Collections

This website links to the manuscript finding aids in our collection, and provides information about using Special Collections. Links to finding aids are also in the library catalog.

ABC-CLIO E-book Collection

This guide provides help for using the core database for U.S. history. For the most detail, go to the "User Guide."

Websites

Here are just a few useful free websites for U.S. Civil War research:

American Civil War Homepage

This gateway to sites about the Civil War is maintained by the University of Tennessee.

American Memory Project

This historical Collection for the National Digital Library provides access to pamphlets, sheet music, photographs, papers, baseball cards, film, folk history materials and other sources of information about the "American Memory". There are also links to the Library of Congress and the National Archives. A very rich source not to be overlooked when researching any aspect of American history, culture, society, etc.

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology

Transcripts from WPA slave narratives selected from The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, George P. Rawick, ed., (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1841-1902

This website provides full-text images of articles published from 1841 to 1902. This was the most widely read afternoon newspaper in the U.S. during the Civil War.

Born in Slavery : Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project 1936-1938

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. From the American Memory Library of Congress.

Documenting the American South

UNC at Chapel Hill provides this substantial collection of primary sources on Southern history. The collection is arranged by the following projects: 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, the North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940, and North Carolinians in the Great War.

Eastern North Carolina Digital Library

Nearly 400 texts (including fictional works) and maps pertaining to the history of 41 eastern North Carolina counties were selected and digitized from East Carolina University's Special Collections. The collection is searchable by author, title, subject, and keyword.

In the First Person: An Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and Personal Narratives

An index to English language personal narratives published or available on the web. It aims to be "the most comprehensive archive of social memory ever created."

Making of America (Cornell)

Includes 22 periodicals, 1815-1901, and 109 monographs. It also provides full-text searchable access to Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (both Armies and Navies series).

Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War

Using letters, diaries, newspapers, speeches, church and census records, this site presents the experiences of two towns, one Northern and one Southern, from John Brown's Raid through Reconstruction. A project of the University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.