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Civil War: Overview

Related Guides

Secondary sources

America: History and Life
A bibliographic database indexing books, book chapters, and over 1,800 journals relating to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.

Franklin
Catalog of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries' books, journals, films, scores, recordings, microforms, electronic resources, etc. It covers all libraries in the Penn system except for the Biddle Law Library, which has the LOLA catalog.

Newspapers

Early American Newspapers, 1690-1900
The collection includes over 900 newspapers covering a wide range of areas over the 19th century.

Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
Database of documents relating to slavery, including over 70 pro- and anti-slavery news publications from America, England, Spain and France.

Chronicling America

Magazines

American Historical Periodicals, 1740-1949
Includes hundreds of religious, political, literary, trade and general interest magazines.

HathiTrust
"HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world."

Historical Books

Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
Nearly 12,000 18th and 19th century books about the slave trade, debates about slavery, and life under slavery.

Hathi Trust
Like Google Books, but supported by contributing research libraries. Texts published before 1923 are in the public domain and freely available for reading and downloading.
Making of America, 1850-1875
The book collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books with 19th century imprints.

Government Documents

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
Confederate Imprints
Items printed in the Confederate States of America between secession from the Union and the surrender of the Confederate military, Dec 1860-Apr 1865
Legislative and Executive U.S. Government Documents
U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978
Over 150,000 cases covering every aspect of law and numerous types of resources, including transcripts, petitions and briefs.
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

American Presidency Project
Contains a number of resources relevant to studies on the American presidency: Public Papers of the Presidents, 1789-2007, State of the Union messages and addresses, inaugural addresses, proclamations, executive orders and more.

Subject Guide

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