Historical Text Archive: Electronic History Resources, online since 1990

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This subcategory contains 42 links

A Conversation with Drew Gilpin Faust(575 clicks)
By Ellen Marsh A Certain Kind of Lady Endowment Chairman Sheldon Hackney talked recently with Drew Gilpin Faust about Southern white women in the Civil War and how their experiences altered postwar attitudes. Faust, Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

African Americans and Formal Education in the American South, 1865-1950(1474 clicks)

Beliefs of Their Fathers: Violence, Religion, and the Black Patch War, 1904-1914(701 clicks)
Article by Rick Gregory in Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, No. 9 (1993)

Bibliography on Southern Women(1445 clicks)
By Elizabeth Nybakken. Short but useful guide to books.

Blue Ridge Institute & Museum(553 clicks)

Church in Southern Black Community, 1780-1925(540 clicks)

Country Folk Magazine(1297 clicks)
An award winning Ozark history and resource website

Documenting the American South(2709 clicks)
The finest single site on the American South.

Emma LeConte Diary(687 clicks)
A JOURNAL, KEPT BY EMMA FLORENCE LeCONTE, FROM DEC. 31, 1864 TO AUG. 6, 1865, WRITTEN IN HER SEVENTEENTH YEAR AND CONTAINING A DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE BURNING OF COLUMBIA, BY ONE WHO WAS AN EYEWITNESS.

Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities (225 clicks)
History Department Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities The ISJL Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities is designed to present a history of every congregation and significant Jewish community in the South. Currently, we have completed Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and will add other states in the near future.

First Person Narratives of the American South(741 clicks)

Grand Ole Opry(1622 clicks)
Official site of this Nashville and Southern institution.

H-SOUTH Discussion Network(1186 clicks)
" WELCOME TO H-SOUTH! H-South is an electronic discussion group dedicated to the scholarly exploration of southern history; its transformations, its re-interpretations, and its meanings."

History of the Moon Pie(1434 clicks)
History of this great Southern treat made in Chattanooga, TN.

John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, The(590 clicks)
Multiformat ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700 sound recordings, as well as fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the southern United States.

Letitia M. Burwell, A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War(1460 clicks)
Memoir of Southern plantation life before the Civil War.

Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World(985 clicks)
Kathleen Johnson says: "By making oral histories available in an audio format, the website helps bring the textile mill system of the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to life. However, despite its potential value as an educational resource, ?Like a Family? lacks some of the features necessary for a comprehensive public history website?most notably opportunities for interactive learning and community involvement. "

Loading Cotton Bales On Steam Boat (1937)(375 clicks)
video clip

Mary Norcott Bryan, A Grandmother's Recollections of Dixie(1034 clicks)
Collection of letters.

Mind of the South(388 clicks)
W. J. Cash's classic article

Museum of Southern History(1312 clicks)
"To provide an educational convenience whose contents are of public appeal to persons interested in the history of the southern United States. It is dedicated to preserve the entire lifestyle of the antebellum south...a unique civilization, and honorable chapter of american history that is...gone with the wind. To this end, the museum displays and features artifacts and memorabilia from the antebellum period. In addition, the museum maintains a non-lending research library which contains approximately 3000 volumes on southern literature,history,art architecture, economy and government."

Nashville Historical Newsletter(1218 clicks)
"The mission of the Nashville [TN] Historical Newsletter is to provide a medium for historical sharing. Your participation is invited and encouraged. Use the e-mail link to contact us--and to request a hard copy of the latest issue of the NHN."

Norfolk and Western Railway(1189 clicks)
"Norfolk and Western Railway is the product of more than 200 railroad mergers spanning a century and a half. Beginning in 1838 with a nine-mile line from Petersburg, Va., to City Point, Va., NW grew to a system serving 14 states and a province of Canada on more than 7,000 miles of road."

North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920(1023 clicks)
"documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When completed, it will include all the narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920."

Peonage in the South(405 clicks)
FROM "The Life Story of a Negro Peon," in The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves, ed. by Hamilton Holt (New York. 1906), pp. 183-99.

Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination(896 clicks)
Photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section (later transferred to the Office of War Information) were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America during the years the unit was in operation. They were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments. Although no documentation has been found to indicate that photographers were explicitly encouraged to photograph racial discrimination signs, the collection includes a significant number of this type of image, which is rarely found in other Prints and Photographs Division collections.

Probing the Past(107 clicks)
Probate records provide valuable information about the lifestyles of people during the colonial and early national periods. Such listings of possessions, from a time when household goods were not widely mass-produced, illuminate a family’s routines, rituals, and social relations, as well as a region’s economy and connection to larger markets. They also shed light on attitudes and policies toward slavery. For famous people, these records enrich our knowledge and understanding of their daily lives and values. For ordinary people, they offer a rare glimpse into their lived experience. These records also provide an opportunity to engage in comparative studies with other eras and to analyze how culture changes over time.

Race & Slavery Petitions(737 clicks)
"In these and a number of other areas, legislative petitions show the complex and ambiguous nature of race and slavery in the South. They demonstrate how some blacks remained loyal to the South, even to the institution of slavery, while some whites criticized the South's treatment of slaves and stood against the "peculiar institution." There are petitions from free persons of color who owned slaves, controlled large tracts of land, and attempted to conceal their African heritage; there are petitions from slaves who, in economic terms, were better off than their white neighbors; there are even petitions from free blacks who wished to return to slavery. In short, these documents portray, in vivid and personal terms, the contrasts, ambivalences, contradictions, ironies, and ambiguities that comprise southern history."

Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations From the Revolution Through the Civil War(1323 clicks)
Series J: Selections from the Southern Historical Collection Part 6: Mississippi and Arkansas. A guide to document collections. The essay by Kenneth Stamp is worth reading.

Rethinking the Confederacy(593 clicks)
Washington Post article by Joseph Crespino

Richardson's Southern Guide(57 clicks)
Richardson's southern guide; a complete handbook to the beauty spots, historical places, noted battlefields, famous resorts, principal industries and chief points of interest of the South.. (1905)

Rise and Fall of Jim Crow(960 clicks)

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry(258 clicks)
"In this lecture, historian Philip D. Morgan compares the Lowcountry and Chesapeake slave cultures and reveals much about the way of life of some of the earliest African Americans. Although South Carolina in the eighteenth century was built by slave labor, Virginia only began to “recruit” slaves in large numbers at the beginning of that century. Consequently, there were substantial differences in the black cultures that emerged in the two regions."

Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives(1070 clicks)
"The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (SBHLA) is a research center for the study of Baptist history and life. Operated by the Council of Seminary Presidents, the research center is located on the fourth floor of the Southern Baptist Convention Building at 901 Commerce Street in Nashville, Tennessee. "

Southern Historical Association(1202 clicks)
"The Southern Historical Association was organized November 2, 1934. Its objectives are the promotion of interest and research in southern history, the collection and preservation of the South's historical records, and the encouragement of state and local historical societies in the South. As a secondary purpose the Association fosters the teaching and study of all areas of history in the South."

Southern History and Resources(1843 clicks)
Links to Ante-Bellum South; The Era of the Confederacy; Era of Reconstruction; Turn of the Century South; Between the World Wars; The Dixiecrat South; The Post-Modern Era; and General Resources with Links

Southern Spaces(219 clicks)
An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections

The Idea of the South: Electronic Resources(1052 clicks)
The University of Virginia provides links.

Tobacco Bag Stringing(675 clicks)
n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, families throughout the tobacco-growing regions of North Carolina and Virginia earned much-needed income by sewing drawstrings into cotton tobacco bags. Long forgotten today, tobacco bag stringing was a common activity in many communities.

Underground Railroad in Wisconsin(762 clicks)

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories(758 clicks)
"Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories provides the opportunity to listen to former slaves describe their lives. These interviews, conducted between 1932 and 1975, capture the recollections of twenty-three identifiable people born between 1823 and the early 1860s and known to have been former slaves."

Why the Ku Klux Klan(800 clicks)
"William Stewart Simkins (1842-1929) was a faculty member at The University of Texas School of Law from 1899 to 1929. He invented the mythical animal known as the "Peregrinus," which is currently the name of the law school yearbook, and he and his brother Eldred James Simkins organized the Ku Klux Klan in Florida. This article appeared in The Alcalde, which is the alumni magazine for The University of Texas at Austin; this issue was the 1916 Commencement Issue. Simkins delivered this address as the centerpiece of the campus's Thanksgiving Day observance in 1914."