Though some of these resources fall outside of the temporal scope of the assignment, they all can be useful in understanding the historical background of whatever topic you choose.
America History and Life
A bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
American National Biography
The landmark American NationalBiography offers portraits of
more than 17,400 men and women -- from all eras and walks of life --
whose lives have shaped the nation. More than a decade in preparation,
the American National Biography Online provides electronic
access and quarterly updates for the 1999 print ANB publication. The
online edition adds hundreds of new entries each year and revises
previously published entries to enhance their accuracy and currency.
The ANB Online features thousands of illustrations, more
than 80,000 hyperlinked cross-references, links to select web sites,
and powerful search capabilities.
American Civil War Research Database
The American Civil War Research Database is a fine online
resource for researching the soldiers, regiments, and battles of the
American Civil War. The database contains indexed, searchable information on over 4
million soldiers and thousands of battles, together with 15,000
photographs. With thousands of regimental rosters and officer profiles,
the database will continue to grow as new information is loaded
bi-annually.
American Periodical Series Online 1740-1900
This collection includes digitized images of the pages of American
magazines and journals published from colonial days to the beginning of
the 20th century.The collection will be comprised of more than 1,000
titles, including Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine, the first American professional journals, and several popular magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Ladies' Home Journal.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography
Includes the life histories of former American slaves and the
transcripts of actual slave interviews. This is an authoritative
collection of Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives and
the Comprehensive Name Index for The American Slave on the Web.
Colonial and State Records of North Carolina-UNC Chapel Hill
The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina
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.
Documenting the American South-UNC Chapel Hill
Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to
texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature,
and culture. Currently DocSouth includes twelve thematic collections of
books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews,
and songs.
Early American Newspapers (1690-1922)
Readex's Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1922 is a unique,
web-based archive of Americana that provides a fascinating glimpse into
our nation's past. Early American Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876
features the images and full-text content from about 700 historical
publications. Series II adds about 200 titles, focusing on the period
1820-1860; and Series III adds about 125 titles, focusing on the period
1860-1920.
Early Encounters in North America
Early Encounters in North America contains about 1500 authors and over
100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early
encounters between native inhabitants and explorers from other
countries. Gathered from about 400 sources, entries include text and
images searchable or browseable along several indexes, including
encounter, environment and places, flora, fauna, images, author, year,
sources, and personal or cultural events.
Early English Books Online
From the first book published in English through the age of Spenser and
Shakespeare, this collection contains over 125,000 titles listed in
Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's
Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well
as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection. The Early English Books
Tract Supplement provides an exceptional perspective on many aspects of
16th and 17th-century British life.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
The Eighteenth Century Collections Online is the most ambitious single
digitization project ever undertaken. It delivers every significant
English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain
during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works
from the Americas.
HarpWeek: The Civil War Era and Reconstruction
The web version of Harper'sWeekly covers the 18,500 pages of the
magazine published during the Civil War era and Reconstruction.
Harper's Weekly provided detailed information and insights on
political, military and social issues and events prior to and during
the Civil War and through the years of Reconstruction. The newspaper
illustrations, which featured Winlsow Homer, Thomas Nast and Mathew
Brady, were its readers primary source for visualizing personalities
and current events; its editorials explored the positions and
subtleties of timely topics and were a major force in shaping public
opinion in the North; its 1,000-plus pieces of military and home front
prose, along with its 18,000 indexed ads, help make the events, people
and popular culture of that time readily understandable and accessible
to today's students, teachers, and researchers.
JSTOR
JSTOR (Journal Storage Project) is a nonprofit organization whose goals
include building a reliable and comprehensive archive of important
scholarly journal literature, increasing access to these journals, and
helping fill gaps in existing library collections of journal backfiles.
To this end, it provides the complete back files of 218 important
research journals in the humanities, social sciences and sciences.
Journals are scanned, so that they include full page images that look
just like the original.
Newsbank: North Carolina Newspapers
Provides full-text articles from more than 50 newspapers in North
Carolina. Titles include Charlotte Observer, Asheville Citizen-Times,
The News & Observer, Winston-Salem Journal, Greensboro News &
Record and many others.
North Carolina Biographical Index-UNC Chapel Hill
The North
Carolina Collection Biographical Index contains citations to biographical
sketches about North Carolinians. Over five hundred volumes, primarily
from the North Carolina Collection and other libraries at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have been indexed to date.
Periodicals Index Online
Periodicals Index Online is the new name for Periodicals Contents Index
- a database of millions of article citations published in the arts,
humanities and social sciences, across more than 300 years.
Periodicals Archive Online
Periodicals Archive Online is both an electronic index to the contents
of thousands of scholarly journals and popular periodicals in the
humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995, and a
major online archive that makes the backfiles of more than 200
periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available in digital
form.
Proquest Historical Newspapers
ProQuest Historical Newspapers offers full-text and full-image articles
for The New York Times from 1851 - 2003, The Wall Street Journal from
1889 - 1989, The Washington Post from 1877 - 1990, The Los Angeles
Times from 1881-1985, The Christian Science Monitor from 1908 - 1993,
and the Chicago Defender from 1905 - 1975. Researchers can use the
database to find not only news, editorials, letters to the editor,
obituaries, and birth and marriage announcements, but also historical
photos, stock photos, and advertisements.
Sanborn Maps of North Carolina
Sanborn Maps for the state of North Carolina provides digital access to
11,173 large-scale maps of 158 North Carolina towns and cities. Users
have the ability to easily manipulate the maps, magnify and zoom in on
specific sections, and compare maps from different years. The maps
cover the time period 1867-1970.