U.S. Emancipation and Reconstruction

Lowcountry Digital Library
The Lowcountry Digital Library digitizes and makes accessible unique local resources. Both the Drayton Family Papers 1837-1869, and the Heyward and Ferguson Family Papers 1806-1923, contain multiple documents relating to reconstruction and freedmen in South Carolina. Phosphate, Farms and Family: The Donner Collection contains photographs taken from 1844-1916 and includes multiple images from the reconstruction era.

South Carolina During Reconstruction
The material on this website was created by Ehren K. Foley, a Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina who is currently working on a dissertation that explores the construction and performance of masculinity in postemancipation South Carolina. The website was written and designed as part of an internship with the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office and the Public History Program at the University of South Carolina. This site includes GIS materials, maps and more.

The Valley of the Shadow
The Valley of the Shadow is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War - Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennyslvania. The Valley Web site includes searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slaveowner census data, and tax records. The Valley Web site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters. The Valley project is a University of Virginia research project funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Harper's Weekly Presents The 19th Century World:
The Ku Klux Klan Hearings, The Reconstruction Convention Simulation & the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Bring 19th century history to life in the classroom utilizing this series of educational activities and simulation games covering the topics of the Ku Klux Klan Act, Reconstruction and the Andrew Johnson impeachment. These content rich features have been drawn from news articles, editorials, illustrations, and cartoons found in the pages of Harper's Weekly.

Albion Winegar Tourgée Collection
Albion Tourgée: son of immigrants, college graduate, Civil War veteran, husband, father, lawyer, judge, author, editor, diplomat, and activist. Tourgee was a northern Republican who lived in North Carolina and was active in promoting equal rights for African Americans throughout his lifetime. The historical evidence of Tourgée's life and career provides a picture of a man who believed in and advocated for equal rights for all citizens.

Fold3
The web's premier collection of original military records.

Documenting the American South
A digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

American Antiquarian Society—Northern Visions of Race, Region and Reform
Through a Glass Darkly: Images of Race, Region, and Reform is an online exhibition documenting conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War.

National Parks Service—History & Culture
Series of exhibitions focused on historical topics and the historical preservation of the National Parks Service’s 400 national parks and National Heritage Areas.

Freedmen's Bureau Online
Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War
This exhibit examines one of the most turbulent and controversial eras in American history. It presents an up-to-date portrait of a period whose unrealized goals of economic and racial justice still confront our society.

Library of Congress—Civil War & Reconstruction
Includes documents, maps, timelines and classroom resources.

Harper's Weekly—Towards Racial Equality, 1857-1874
Online exhibition featuring content from Harper’s Weekly’s reports on Black America in the decades prior and following the Civil War.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation.

U.S. Military Records

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System
A database containing information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records.

Teaching With Documents: The Fight for Equal Rights—Black Soldiers in the Civil War
Teacher's resources from the National Archives.

North Carolina Union Volunteers
North Carolina Union volunteers in the first and second regiments of NC.

2nd South Carolina Volunteers
Links to an historical overview, archival papers, and memorial information for the Second South Carolina Volunteers (Colored) later to be know as the 34^th Regiment Infantry United States Colored Troops.

Overview of Service Record for the 102nd USCT
Military service records between July 1863 and October 1865 for the 102^nd regiment of the United States Colored Troops.

United States Colored Troops Institute
The United States Colored Troops Institute for Local History and Family Research at Hartwick College is an educational institute to promote and encourage original historical and genealogical research about the 200,000 black men and their 7,000 white officers who comprised the US Colored Troops during the American Civil War.

North Carolina

The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony
This site presents an introduction to the colony and the colonial experiment that was conducted there. It also features some primary sources, maps, and projects for students.

North Carolina History Project
NorthCarolinahistory.org is an edited, evolving, and free online encyclopedia of North Carolina that also includes commentaries, lesson plans, and a community calendar.

Learn NC
LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, provides lesson plans, professional development, and innovative web resources to support teachers, build community, and improve K-12 education in North Carolina.

Eastern North Carolina Digital Library
Formerly known as the North Carolina History Fiction Digital Library, the new Eastern North Carolina Digital Library contains 399 fiction and non-fiction volumes, 150+ museum artifacts, maps and educational material pertaining to the history of the 41 counties in Eastern North Carolina.

Forgotten Sons - North Carolinians In The Union Army
A thesis presented to the Graduate School of Appalachian State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts.

Caswell County Historical Association: Ku Klux Klan Activity (1869-1871)
Records gleaned from the National Archives submitted by Governor William W. Holden relating to crimes of the Ku Klux Klan against citizens of North Carolina between the years 1869 and 1871.

North Carolina Historical Review
Established in January 1924 as a medium of publication and discussion of history in North Carolina, the Review offers a number of regular features that have made it a definitive source for the study and understanding of the state's history.

South Carolina

Avery Research Center, Online Finding Aids
Online guides to archival collections at the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.

South Carolina Department of Archives and History
An independent state agency whose mission is to preserve and promote the documentary and cultural heritage of the Palmetto State.

South Carolina Information Highway
The Palmetto State's most popular commercial website, with over 7 million unique visitors a year. This site features information about everything from tourism and history to jobs and real estate, and provides links to further resources on South Carolina's African American history and heritage.

New South Newspaper [Port Royal]
The New South (1862-1866) offers a glimpse into an era of unprecedented social upheaval in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Lowcountry Africana
Lowcountry Africana, sponsored by the Magnolia Plantation Foundation of Charleston, South Carolina, is entirely dedicated to records that document the family and cultural heritage of African Americans in the historic rice-growing areas of South Carolina, Georgia and extreme northeastern Florida, a region that scholars and preservationists have identified as a distinct culture area, home to the rich Gullah/Geechee culture.

Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor
Designated by Congress in 2006, the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor is home to one of America's most unique cultures, a tradition first shaped by captive Africans brought to the southern United States from West Africa and continued in later generations by their descendents.

The Gullah: Rice, Slavery and the Sierra Leone-American Connection
University of Sierra Leone anthropologist, Joseph A. Opala’s, online exhibition considers the West African-American cultural connection through the Gullah people of the Southeastern United States.

Audio/Visual and other Media

PBS Series: "Thus Far by Faith: 1866-1945: from Emancipation to Jim Crow"
In six hours of dramatic storytelling, This Far by Faith examines the African-American religious experience through the last three centuries. From the arrival of the early African slaves, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights era, and into the 21st Century. This Far by Faith explores the connections between faith and the development of African-American cultural values.

PBS: Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
Spanning the momentous years from 1863 to 1877, Reconstruction tracks the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans—Southern and Northern, white and black—as they struggle to shape new lives for themselves in a world turned upside down.

Collections Featured from Lowcountry Digital Library

College of Charleston Stereoscope Views 

Heyward and Ferguson family papers, 1806-1923