Student Resources

Information Sources

African American Odyssey: This showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library’s buildings.

Alan Lomax Collection: Contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images of ethnographic material created and collected by Alan Lomax and others in their work documenting song, music, dance, and body movement from many cultures.

Civil Rights Cold Case Project: The Civil Rights Cold Case Project is an unprecedented collaboration bringing together the power of investigative reporting, narrative writing, documentary filmmaking, and interactive multimedia production to reveal the long-neglected truth behind unsolved civil rights murders, and to facilitate reconciliation and healing.

Civil Rights Digital Library: The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.

Civil Rights Movement Veterans: This website is of, by, and for Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. It is where we tell it like it was, the way we lived it.

Civil Rights Resource Guide: The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to civil rights, including photographs, documents, and sound recordings. This guide compiles links to civil-rights resources throughout the Library of Congress Web site. In addition, it provides links to external Web sites focusing on civil rights and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers.

Civil War in the American South: A central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), whose members hold deep and extensive collections documenting the history and culture of the American South. Many of the special or unique manuscripts, photographs, books, newspapers, broadsides, and other materials have been digitized to provide broader access to these documents for scholars and students around the world.

Civil War Resource Guide: This guide is a compilation of many of the Civil War resources at the Library of Congress, along with links to selected resources outside the Library. The resources are organized by format. The purpose of this guide is to present researchers with selected sources through which they can begin and expand their scope of study of the American Civil War. It is not meant to serve as an exhaustive source for Civil War sources accessible through the Library of Congress.

Encyclopedia of Alabama: Encyclopedia of Alabama is a reliable resource covering Alabama’s history, culture, geography, and natural environment.

Encyclopedia of Arkansas: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas is a free, authoritative source of information about the rich history, geography, and culture of Arkansas. It is updated regularly to ensure the people of Arkansas have an accurate and accessible resource to explore our heritage.

Eudora Welty Foundation: In 1999 the Eudora Welty Foundation was established to assist the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) in achieving its goals of celebrating the legacy of Eudora Welty, enhancing appreciation of her work, and encouraging reading and the efforts of young writers.

Farm Security Administration Photographs: The black-and-white photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection are a landmark in the history of documentary photography. The images show Americans at home, at work, and at play with an emphasis on rural and small-town life and the adverse effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and increasing farm mechanization.

Faulkner Society: The William Faulkner Society is dedicated to fostering the study of Faulkner from all perspectives and to promoting research, scholarship, and criticism dealing with his writings and their place in literature.

Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation: Based at O’Connor’s home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, the foundation encourages and promotes an increased understanding of the life, time, surroundings, and accomplishments of Flannery O’Connor.

Documenting the American South: Enormous collection of electronic texts including North American slave narrative and southern literature to 1920.

Encyclopedia Virginia: Encyclopedia Virginia is a dynamic, authoritative, and globally accessible resource that explores the people, places, events, and institutions of the Commonwealth. Published by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, EV provides a platform for discovering and learning about Virginia.

H-Southern-Lit: A discussion network promoting the study and discussion of U.S. southern literature by scholars, teachers, researchers, and other interested parties.

H-Southern-Music: The primary purpose of H-Southern Music is to provide a forum for exploring and discussing the historical nature of the South’s musical contributions to national and world culture.

Jim Crow Museum: Collects, exhibits, and preserves objects and collections related to racial segregation, civil rights and anti-Black caricatures; and promote the scholarly examination of historical and contemporary expressions of racism.

Mississippi Writers Page: This multi-faceted Internet Resource is about writers in, from, or otherwise associated with the state of Mississippi. Presented by the Department of English at the University of Mississippi, it is designed both as an introduction to the diversity of literary talent in Mississippi and as a source of accurate and timely information for the serious literary scholar. Parts of this website are still under construction, but information continues to be added to the database.

National Civil Rights Museum: The National Civil Rights Museum, located at the Lorraine Motel, the assassination site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., chronicles key episodes of the American civil rights movement and the legacy of this movement to inspire participation in civil and human rights efforts globally, through our collections, exhibitions, and educational programs.

New Georgia Encyclopedia: The New Georgia Encyclopedia is an authoritative source on the people, places, events, and institutions of Georgia. The site contains nearly 2,000 articles and more than 5,000 images and audio and video clips on the history, culture, and life of the state.

Not Even Past: Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin history department, Not Even Past provides current historical writing to a popular audience. For history buffs who want reading recommendations and short, interesting, digestible stories every day, the website offers a meaningful, dynamic, and ongoing conversation about History in the form of text, audio, and video histories on subjects that span the globe.

Oxford American: The Oxford American is a national magazine out of Conway, Arkansas, dedicated to featuring the very best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South.

Religion in American History: A group blog to foster discussion and share research, insights, reviews, observations, syllabi, links, new books, project information, grant opportunities, seminars, lectures, and thoughts about religion in American history, and American religious history.

Simms Initiatives: In the mid-19th-century, William Gilmore Simms did more than any other writer and editor to frame white southern self-identity, nationalism, and historical consciousness. He also did more to foster the South’s literary life and place in America’s imagination. With the Simms Initiatives one has growing access to this prolific author’s work.

Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer’s Project: 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 Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

Slavery Resource Guide: The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material related to slavery including photographs, documents, and sound recordings. This guide compiles links to slavery resources throughout the Library of Congress website. In addition, it provides links to external websites focusing on slavery and a bibliography containing selections for both general and younger readers.

Southern Literary Trail: The southern literary trail is a collaboration of eighteen southern towns from Natchez to Savannah that celebrate internationally renowned writers and playwrights of the twentieth century who were inspired by their communities.

Southern Oral History Program: Since 1973, the SOHP has worked to preserve the voices of the southern past. UNC students and faculty have interviewed more than 4,000 men and women—from mill workers to civil rights leaders to future presidents of the United States. Made available through UNC’s renowned Southern Historical Collection and, increasingly, through the innovative use of web-based technologies, these interviews capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring history to life.

Southern Poverty Law Center: The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 as a small civil rights law firm. Today, SPLC is internationally known for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists, and its tracking of hate groups.

Southern Spaces: A peer-reviewed internet journal and scholarly forum that provides open access to essays, gateways, timescapes, events and conferences, interviews and performances, and annotated weblinks on real and imagined spaces and places of the American South.

Southern Sources: Long at the center of inquiry into the history and culture of the American South, the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) documents this region with its massive holdings of unique, primary source materials: letters, diaries, oral histories, photographs, sound recordings, financial records, literary manuscripts, and items in many other formats.

Tennessee Encyclopedia: a definitive and comprehensive reference work on the Volunteer State cosponsored by the University of Tennessee Press and the Tennessee Historical Society.

The Valley of the Shadow: The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one northern and one southern, from the time of John Brown’s raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive, you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

Vanishing Georgia: Comprises nearly 18,000 photographs. Ranging from daguerreotypes to Kodachrome prints, the images span over 100 years of Georgia history.

Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal: This site is designed to help researchers and Yale students find primary sources related to slavery, abolition, and resistance within the university’s many libraries and galleries.

University Institutes

Spencer B. King, Jr. Center for Southern Studies: A center at Mercer whose primary purpose is to examine the region’s complex history and culture through courses, conversations, and events that are open, honest, and accessible.

Center for the Study of the American South: A center at the University of North Carolina that fosters outstanding scholarship exploring every aspect of the South’s rich though often painful past and supports the region’s democratic and progressive future.

Institute for Southern Studies: Academic center at the University of South Carolina, sponsoring research fellowships, conferences,  and awards.

Center for the Study of Southern Culture: A research institute at the University of Mississippi that emphasizes the interdisciplinary investigation and documentation of the South as a culturally, historically, geographically, and demographically complex region.

Center for the Study of the New South: The Center for the Study of the New South in UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences promotes discourse and dialogue on a rich and diverse constellation of topics and ideas relating to the New South.

Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South: Based in the American Studies Department and the Department of History at the University of Sussex, the Marcus Cunliffe Centre offers a concentration of scholars of the history of the South unparalleled anywhere outside the United States.

Center for Appalachian Studies: The Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, develops, coordinates, and facilitates curricula and programs which deal with the Appalachian region.

Center for Appalachian Studies and Services: East Tennessee State University’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Services documents and showcases Appalachia’s past, celebrates its cultural heritage, and promotes an understanding of the influences that shape its identity.

Summersell Center for the Study of the South: Capitalizing on the rich resources available at the University of Alabama and the surrounding region, the Summersell Center promotes understanding of the history and culture of the American South through research and public programming.