Finding Primary Source Materials: Personal History
Letters, Diaries, Autobiography, and More
- American Civil War: Letters and DiariesBrings together more than 400 diaries, letters, and memoirs written by Northerners, Southerners, and foreign observers that reveal thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war. See and compare the first-person accounts of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, seamen, and spies.
- Early Encounters in North America: Peoples, Cultures, and the EnvironmentDocuments the relationships among diverse peoples, including Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, African, and a host of Indian peoples, in North America from 1534 to 1850. Includes prints, drawings, paintings, maps, bibliographies, letters, photographs, and original facsimile pages.
- HeritageQuestA collection of research materials for tracing family history and American culture. With original page images for all documents, this resource contains over 25,000 books, the entire U.S. Federal Census, and other expanding collections.
- North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral HistoriesProvides a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. With more than 100,000 pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories, the collection provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Several thousand pages of Ellis Island Oral History interviews, indexed and searchable for the first time, are included, along with thousands of political cartoons.
- North American Women's Letters and DiariesIndex of over 1,000 volumes of published and unpublished Canadian and American women's diaries and correspondence from Colonial times through 1950.
Personal History at UNC
- First Person Narratives of the American SouthCollection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners.
- North American Slave NarrativesCollects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights.
- Oral Histories of the American SouthThree-year project to select, digitize and make available 500 oral history interviews gathered by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP).
- True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North CarolinaPresents 121 edited documents written primarily by students attending the University of North Carolina between 1795 when the institution opened its doors and 1868, when the devastation of the Civil War closed them for a semester.
- A Nursery of Patriotism: The University at War, 1861-1945Includes letters and other personal writings from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.
Archival Resources at UNC
Records, Papers, Archives
The Libraries offer many primary source documents, in a variety of formats.
Many digitized collections can be found within this guide and on the History databases page.
You can also search the online catalog for primary sources, using words such as: personal narratives, autobiographies, diaries, letters, records, sources, interviews, archives, or archival sources:
Visit our Wilson Special Collections Library. Additionally, many of these materials have been digitized. You will also find extensive digitized materials available on the Finding Aids for individual collections.
The guide for Using Records about Slavery in the Southern Historical Collection is a fantastic resource for the topic, but also an excellent guide to using Finding Aids and other research strategies for special collections.
Take some time to familiarize yourself with the various special collections. Keep in mind that our collection is extensive, going far beyond NC related material, and could include something relevant to your research no matter what your topic may be. Also, explore the special collections at Duke's Rubenstein Library using the same login you made when setting up an account for accessing material from Wilson Special Collections.
