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Civil War Resources at Wilson Special Collections Library: General Resources
General History
Battleground for the Union by ISBN: 0130693863Publication Date: 1989-09-01A broadly interpretive survey of the Civil War and Reconstruction including events leading up to the War and until the 1880's.
Transnational Histories
Primary Sources
- Confederate ImprintsA list of books printed by the Confederate States of America contained in the Confederate Imprint Collection from the Rare Books Library and more Confederate-printed materials in the North Carolina Collection.
- Wilmer Civil War Novels CollectionFiction about the Civil War. Books are published between 1860 and the end of the 20th century.
Newspapers
- Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines: Important and Rare Periodicals from Confederate, Union, Abolitionist, and British PressesContains articles, illustrations, cartoons, and maps drawn from rare periodicals and campaign newspapers representing Union, Confederate, Abolitionist, and British viewpoints. Published between 1860 and 1865, the titles enable users to browse issues week by week to follow the election of Lincoln in 1860; the subsequent course of the Civil War from Fort Sumter through Appomattox; Lincoln's re-election in 1864; his assassination in 1865; and the beginning of Reconstruction under President Andrew Johnson. In addition Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines contains dozens of scholarly contributions, including an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, James McPherson, making the database the definitive online Civil War media resource.
- Newspapers.com (North Carolina Newspapers)Provides access to historic newspapers from the 1700s to the present. UNC users have access to a large selection of North Carolina newspapers through a partnership between Newspapers.com and the UNC University Library.
Note: Please clear your browser's cache and cookies if you are having problems accessing this resource - Chronicling AmericaAllows you to identify newspapers of all kinds published in America from 1690 to the present, see details about them, and find libraries that hold the papers either in paper or microform. Chronicling America provides free access to historic U.S. newspapers published from 1836 through 1922. North Carolina newspapers number among the titles available from more than 30 states and the District of Columbia.
Documenting the American South
- Documenting the American SouthDocumenting the American South is a collection of digitized material related to the study of the American South. Books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs have been included. Contributing institutions include UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. Those interested in the history and culture of African Americans in North Carolina will find a lot of material here, freely accessible from off campus as well as on site. Users can search the entire site via full-text searching.
Other Databases
- JSTORProvides an image archive of important scholarly journal literature in nearly all the humanities and social sciences disciplines, international and foreign areas studies, and many of the sciences. UNC patrons have access to extensive retrospective holdings of hundreds of journals, starting with the first issues. Excludes the most recent 2-5 years of currently available journals.
- Ancestry LibraryA major tool for genealogical and biographical research, particularly for the United States, providing access to vital records, census and voter lists, immigration records, military records, directories, tax, criminal, land, and will records, and more.
Other Resources
- A Bibliography Literature about the U.S. Civil War Published Between 1960 and 1869 in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections LibraryThe core texts of this bibliography come from the object labels of the Imagining the U.S. Civil War: 1861-1900 exhibition, which was on display in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room from April 24-July 20, 2014. Wilson Special Collections Library’s first large-scale student curated exhibition, Imagining the U.S. Civil War was the product of a semester-long collaboration between Eliza Richards’s English 444 course of the same name and Wilson Special Collections Library’s Research and Instruction Services and Rare Book Collection staff. The undergraduate students wrote descriptive labels to accompany over 80 items, the majority of which came from printed items held in the North Carolina Collection and the Rare Book Collection.
- Journal of the Civil War EraThe Journal of the Civil War Era is published by UNC Press in association with the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. It publishes the most creative new work on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the country’s signal conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.