Durham and Local History: Finding Primary Sources

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library contains many resources on Durham beginning in the 19th century. For example,

• Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South. 1940-1997 and n.d. (bulk 1993-1997)
  Seeks to record and preserve the living memory of African-American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South, from the 1890s to the 1950.The collections mainly contains interviews recorded on cassette tapes. The printed materials with the collection include biographical information about informants, brief summaries on the interviews, and transcripts of approximately 314 interviews. The transcripts are also available as electronic documents.
• League of Women Voters of Durham, 1947-1991
• Young Women's Christian Association Records, 1920-1992
• Lincoln Hospital Records, 1901-1988

To identify other collections, search the Library catalog

The Perkins Library System  has telephone directories and city directories throughout the twentieth century.  Ask at the Perkins Research Services Desk.

• DigitalNC
  Online home for materials presented by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.

• Documenting the American South
  Provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.

• Duke Libraries' Digital Collections

• Open Durham
  An archive/inventory of information about people, places, and history in Durham, NC. It grew out of the blog "Endangered Durham."

• Durham Civil Rights Heritage Project
  The project's main focus has been to collect photographs depicting the movement in Durham. Oral histories of Durham's civil rights era have also been gathered by the project.

• Digital Durham
  Provides a wide range of manuscript and printed materials from the 1870s through the 1920s with which to investigate the economic, social, cultural, and political history of post-bellum Durham.