These databases provide primary documents on the U.S. Civil War.
Getting started with academic research | Overview of U.S. history | Recommended databases | U.S. Civil War | General history databases
Browse, search, and retrieve full page images of Harper's Weekly, which chronicles the events of the American Civil War and reconstruction years. Page images are JPG; full text is HTML and PDF. Harper’s Weekly is a consistent, comprehensive, week-to-week chronological record of what happened worldwide in the last half of the nineteenth century.
Making of America provides digital reproductions of primary sources related to development of the U.S. infrastructure. Content is provided in text, GIF, and PDF formats. Major segments of this collection include magazines, ebooks, and Civil War documents. 1840-1900.
Contains basic facts about servicemen who served on both sides of the Civil War. Facts are from records that are indexes of other documents about Union and Confederate Civil War soldiers maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration. Also includes histories of regiments in both the Union and Confederate Armies and descriptions of 384 significant battles of the war. Currently contains over 6 million soldier names from 44 states and territories.
A digital publishing initiative that provides online access to primary sources such as texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes fourteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, maps, literary works, oral history interviews, and songs. 1500s-present.
American Slavery contains both an overview of the collection of former slave narratives with related links (available without charge from the home page) and the collection of narratives themselves. Each narrative is delivered as a PDF as originally transcribed, with some interviews available as sound files. Searchable by name of narrator, interviewer, or master, the county or state where the narrator lived in slavery, the narrator's age or year of birth, or the location of the material in the print version (volume and page). 1920s-1940s (original interviews).