The South: Culture and History

You can use the Libraries' Catalog to find books at UA.  However, you can also use WorldCat and Google Books to search for books outside of UA.

Scout--Use the online catalog to locate book and journal holdings for all of the University Libraries.  Please note the Hoole Special Collection contains many materials that are not cataloged.

Other book finders:

WorldCat--searches the catalogs of thousands of Libraries across the United States.  You can use Interlibrary Loan to order many books that are not available at UA. 

Google Books--find citations to thousands of online books.  Some charge a fee, but others are fully available online for free.

Academic Search Premier -Very useful for starting an article search.  Contain citations and full-text entries from hundreds of scholarly and popular periodicals.

America: History and Life-the premier database for secondary sources in American history. 

ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials—useful for studying African-American churches.

Black Studies Center-a "one-stop shop" offering primary and secondary sources on African-American history.

Google Scholar--University of Alabama's portal for Google Scholar.  Google Scholar is a special part of Google that only finds scholarly articles.  As a UA student, you can access the texts of many of these articles by clicking the links that say "Full-Text @ UAlabama".

JSTOR-contains thousands of articles from key journals in history, political science, sociology, women's studies, and African studies.

The David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection is available at the Hoole Special Collections Library.

Many owners kept records on their plantations that described the lives of the slaves.  Plantation records included Day Journals (a log of each day's activities), rules of the plantation, Wills, Bibles (owners often kept track of slave births, marriages, and deaths in their Bibles), inventories of slaves, accounts of doctor visits, letters, and Master's Records (diaries).  Here are a few resources:

Rules for overseers on southern plantations--one plantation owner's rules for managing slaves.

Slave Data Collection--learn about the treatment and status of slaves by reading some of these wills and inventories.

The UA Libraries also have a massive collection of plantation records stored in the Annex along with some guides.  Please ask a librarian about these!

You can listen to or read many of Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons, speeches, letters, and other materials through the King Papers Project site.