LibGuides: Researching Southeast North Carolina History: Online Primary Source Databases

Regional Databases and Digital Collections

These resources are freely accessible to the general public and do not require an institutional login or affiliation.

Cape Fear Museum Photograph Collection
Cape Fear Museum's collection of more than 57,000 objects, paper documents, and photographs sheds light on the history, science, and cultures of the Lower Cape Fear. This online catalog provides access to the Museum's photograph collection, consisting of more than 15,000 images. This catalog will continue to grow as the Museum collects additional photographs.
Civil Rights Digital Library
Resource for Civil Rights Movement primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale.
David Rumsey Map Collection
The David Rumsey Map Collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials. Items range in date from around 1550 to the present.
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To get the most complete view of the collection's North Carolina maps, use the Search the Collection box in the top right corner of the page to search for "North Carolina" (including quotation marks).
Digital Library on American Slavery
Searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color, numbering 150,000
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States.
Documenting the American South
and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
ECU Digital Collections
The digital collections at East Carolina University contain thousands of items documenting the history of eastern North Carolina, including photographs, publications, maps, postcards, and ephemera.
North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library
The North Carolina Collection is dedicated to preserving literary, visual, and artifactual materials illustrating four centuries of the colony and state of North Carolina. The collection comprises three divisions: the Research Library, North Carolina Collection Gallery, and Photographic Archives.
North Carolina Digital Collections
The North Carolina Digital Collections contain over 90,000 historic and recent photographs, state government publications, manuscripts, and other resources on topics related to North Carolina. The Collections are free and full-text searchable, and bring together content from the State Archives of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina.
North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program that works with cultural heritage institutions of all sizes across North Carolina to digitize and publish historic materials online. This website includes yearbooks, newspapers, images, memorabilia, city directories, and audiovisual content from institutions across the state.
North Carolina Maps
North Carolina Maps is a comprehensive, online collection of historic maps of the Tar Heel State. Featuring maps from three of the state's largest map collections -- the State Archives of North Carolina, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center -- North Carolina Maps provides an unprecedented level of access to these materials. North Carolina Maps contains more than 3,000 maps, ranging in date from the late 1500s to 2000, and including detailed maps for each of North Carolina's one hundred counties.
NC State University Libraries' Rare and Unique Digital Collections
NC State University's digital collections include numerous items related to the southeast North Carolina region, primarily consisting of architectural files on historic homes and public structures as well as historical photographs.
Southern Oral History Program
This collection, housed in the Southern Historical Collection of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, contains more than 5,000 oral histories. The Southern Oral History Program Interview Database provides detailed descriptions of the interviews in the Southern Oral History Program Collection. Digital transcripts and audio for many interviews are available through this database created and maintained by the University Library at UNC Chapel Hill. Analog audio recordings, paper transcripts, and supplementary files are available through the Southern Historical Collection in the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill.

Randall Library Databases

These resources are only accessible with a UNCW login or using one of the library's guest computers.

Black Studies
The Black Studies platform allows users to simultaneously search the databases African Diaspora, 1860-Present, Black Studies in Video, and Black Thought and Culture. These databases include full-text, audio and video, across a range of History, Literature, and Performing Arts content.
Gale Primary Sources
Gale offers a number of subject-specific digital collections containing primary sources from all over the world. This link will allow users to search all of Gale's primary source databases at once, but several individual collections in particular include numerous documents related to the Cape Fear region, including Archives of Sexuality and Gender, Archives Unbound, Political Extremism and Radicalism, and Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive.
HeinOnline
Contains more than 1,200 law and law-related periodicals. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes through the most-currently published issues allowed based on contracts with publishers. Retrieve articles by citation, browse, or search across nearly 50 million pages of content. HeinOnline also contains many useful resources for criminology, and public and international affairs, such as the Congressional Record Bound volumes in entirety, complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, the Federal Register from inception in 1936, the CFR from inception in 1938, a library of U.S. Congressional documents, U.S. Federal legislative history and much more. Find more information.
History Vault
Researchers can access digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections. Our collections include Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle, Southern Life and Slavery, American Politics and Society, Workers and Labor Unions, American Indians and the American West, and Women’s Studies. Find more information.
ProQuest Congressional
Comprehensive online collection of primary source congressional publications and legislative research materials covering all topics. This database contains comprehensive and often detailed information on an extremely wide range of subjects, and it provides access to legislative histories, bills by number, committee hearings and testimony, members of congress directory, and social media. It's particularly useful for researching local history topics involving legislation or government intervention.

Researching Southeast North Carolina History

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Regional Databases and Digital Collections

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