Research Guides: The American Civil War: Primary Sources: Diaries, Letters, Memoirs, & Oral Histories

Diaries & Letters

American Civil War: Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries brings together original source material in diaries, letters, and memoirs to provide many points of view on almost every aspect of the war.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
North American Women's Letters and Diaries offers a large collection of women's diaries and correspondence spanning more than 300 years.

Civil War Diaries and Letters (University of Iowa)
Browse a list of scanned diaries and letters from the University of Iowa Libraries, some of which currently have transcriptions, but not all. You can also browse by year to get the materials for a particular time.
Civil War Diaries and Letters Collections (Auburn University)
A collection of diaries and letters from Auburn University, covering both sides of the war; each item is scanned and transcribed.

Oral Histories/Slave Narratives

American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology
This database offers interviews conducted with thousands of former slaves in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration. Read primary accounts of slave family life, religion, music, art, and work. However, Gorgas Library also offers many, many more former WPA slave interviews in print. The official title of the collection is The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.
North American Slave Narratives (The University of North Carolina)
collects 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.
Freedmen and Southern Society Project
a variety of slave interviews, petitions, letters, military documents, testimonies, and other materials related to the freedmen.
African American Women (Duke University)
This Duke University collection includes letters from African-American women who lived on Southern plantations in the 1800s.
From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909 (Library of Congress)
presents 396 pamphlets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, published from 1822 through 1909, by African-American authors and others who wrote about slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and related topics

A Guide for Finding Personal Texts

Personal texts--diaries, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, and papers--usually make excellent primary sources because they were written by a historical person you're studying.

Personal texts are scattered throughout the internet, in databases, and on the shelves of the UA Libraries. Here are some techniques for locating diaries, letters, and other primary sources using Scout, Google, or Classic Catalog:

Combine keywords describing your subject with such words as sources, letters, speeches, writings, documents, diaries, papers, etc. For example, searching for “World War II ” and diaries will locate diaries written during World War II.
Search for key people as authors. For example, let us say that you are researching the European Discovery of America. Searching for Christopher Columbus as an author will locate journals and speeches of Columbus. You can set your search to author in the "Basic Search" screen.
Find secondary sources on a historical figure in Scout. Scan the bibliographies of these secondary sources for diaries, memoirs, letters, and papers.

Memoirs at Gorgas Library

Libraries Catalog
Best for finding print and eBooks. Combine keywords describing your subject with words like diaries, memoirs, etc. Or search for key people as authors. For example, searching for Ulysses S. Grant as an author will locate memoirs and speeches by Grant. You can set your search to author in the "Basic Search" screen.
Scout
Can also be used to find memoirs and other print (or electronic) books. The same general search strategies apply.

Finding Memoirs on WorldCat

WorldCat FirstSearch This link opens in a new window
Contains all the records cataloged by OCLC member libraries. Offers millions of bibliographic records. Includes records representing 400 languages.

Interlibrary Loan
Use Interlibrary loan to request any books, journal articles, theses/dissertations, newspapers, or other sources that the university libraries don't have. With print books and some other sources you may have to wait 1-2 weeks for them to be delivered, but electronic copies of things like scholarly journal articles can be accessed in a matter of days!

The American Civil War

Diaries & Letters

Oral Histories/Slave Narratives

A Guide for Finding Personal Texts

Memoirs at Gorgas Library

Finding Memoirs on WorldCat

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