The Electronic Text Center is home to a variety of primary source material on the American Civil War, including letters, diaries and newspapers.

A clearinghouse list of links to documents, images and photographs from the Civil War era.

A compilation of resources on women in the Civil War from Duke University.

Digitized archive of Civil War documents from the University of Mississippi.

A good compilation of many primary texts from the Civil War era, including official records, inaugural addresses, acts, bills, presidential orders and political cartoons, among many other categories.

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides easy access to summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for years from 1790 through the present and for all levels of U.S. census geography, including states, counties, tracts, and blocks

Diaries and histories written by Pennsylvania soldiers.

The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.

A digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings.

The "Library of Southern Literature" includes a wide range of literary works of the American South published before 1924. This collection begins with some of the earliest texts about America written by British discoverers that set the foundation for American letters and traces the development of southern literature through to the beginning of the twentieth century.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews.

The 1,280 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery.

More transcripts from the Works Progress Administration. In 1937, John A. Lomax, the curator of the American Folk Song Archive at the Library of Congress, became interested in the narratives of ex-slaves that were appearing, and directed field workers to concentrate on this material. This resulted in over 2,000 of these narratives in the Library of Congress collection. Accompanying the digitized narratives are more than 500 photographs.

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project contains primary documents narrated by liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners. Drawing upon the rich resources of the National Archives of the United States, the curators of the project selected some 50,000 documents covering the period from the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 to the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867. The primary documents are supplemented with interpretive essays by the editors to provide historical context.

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War.

Books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

Published in 1872, this book documents the experiences of enslaved people seeking freedom along the Undeground Railroad, "as related by themselves and others, or witnessed by the author."

This digital collection is hosted by the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and contains all the words, photographs, and advertisements from selected newspapers published during the pivotal years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War.

List of New York Times articles and essays related to the Civil War.

Over a thousand Civil War images from the Library of Congress.

List of common photographic methods and their timeframe of use.

University of Iowa Libraries

Chris Wehner, history teacher, Fruita Monument HS

Exhibition from Gilder Lehrman Institute

Valley of the Shadow project

Jim Janke, Dakota State University

University of Notre Dame

Taylor Bye, Dickinson College

PBS - Ken Burns's "Civil War"

Blog Divided

Minnesota Historical Society

Betsy Beyer, Marist College

Civil War 150, House Divided Project

East Carolina University

House Divided Project, Dickinson College

Select digitized sections of the diaries of Sidney George Fisher from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

University of the Pacific

Library of Congress - An examiner for the US Patent Office, Mr. Taft logged events in Washington during the Civil War years, including his connection with Abraham Lincoln and his family. Of special interest is Taft's description of Lincoln's assassination, based on the accounts of his friends and his son, the latter being one of the attending physicians at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, the night Lincoln was shot. Now housed in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, this online collection spans the years 1861 to 1865 and is browseable by date of entry.

Blog Divided

Library of Congress

Journal of American History / House Divided Project

Abraham Lincoln Association, U Michigan

House Divided Project

Abraham Lincoln Association

Smithsonian exhibition

Library of Congress exhibition

Library of Congress

New York Times

PBS

Smithsonian

Major Topics, House Divided Research Engine, Dickinson College

Exhibitions, Gilder Lehrman Institute

National Park Service

PDF document

Essay by Adam Arenson, Common-Place

Missouri State Archives

Washington University

Legal Information Institute, Cornell University

Freedom Suits, Washington University

Matthew Pinsker, Dickinson College