Civil War Resources in Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Indexes and Full Text Databases (Duke Users Only)

• 19th Century Masterfile Provides indexing to nineteenth century periodicals, books, newspapers, and government documents.
• Accessible Archives Provides full-text access to 19th-century newspapers (including African American newspapers) and periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book.
• America's Historical Newspapers Provides full-text access to U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and 1922
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries  Full text diaries, letters and memoirs from the Civil War Period written by generals, slaves, landowners, farmers, seaman, wives, and spies.
• American Periodicals Series  Full text images of popular American newspaper, professional journals and magazines from 1740-1900.
• Harper's Weekly  Provides scanned pages from issues of Harper's Weekly published from 1857 to 1912.
• The New York Times The United States' newspaper of record from 1851 to three years ago.
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries  Contains over 2000 sources from North American women from colonial times to the 1950. It includes records from close to 1,500 women.

Subject headings in the Duke Libraries Catalog can be subdivided into narrower topics by the assignment of standard subheadings. For example, "History" is a subheading that may be used with the name of any country (United States--History) or group (Women --United States --History). You can also use these terms in keyword searches. For help finding books in the stacks, use the guide to Book Locations.

To find primary materials, try one of these subheadings following your subject:
-- Correspondence
-- Letters
-- Diaries
-- Memoirs
-- Personal Narratives
-- Sources

For example:
Prisoners of war -- North Carolina -- Diaries
United States -- History -- Civil War -- Personal Narratives

• The American Civil War, a digital collection of Virginia Tech's Special Collections Library.
• Documenting the American South  (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)  covers Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the twentieth century, this site provides access to materials including first person and slave narratives.
• Hathi Trust Digital Library provides free access to printed material in the public domain.  Notable Civil War texts:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.
• The Internet Archive provides free access to printed material in the public domain.  Notable Civil War texts: the Confederate Veteran and Confederate Imprints.
• Library of Congress Digital Collections provide access to digitized documents on American history and culture from the collections of the Library of Congress.  It is truly a phenomenal site. 
• The Making of America (Cornell) and the Making of America (Michigan) provides fulltext access to primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. This includes digitized books and long runs of journals. A collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Michigan, each site provides access to the other. 
• The Valley of the Shadow, a collaboration between the Virginia Center for Digital History and the University of Virginia Library, explores in detail the life during the American Civil War era in two towns, one Southern and one Northern.