Book People Archive

Documenting the American South



The number of books on the Web continues to grow at an increasing pace!
Last night I indexed the 3000th title for the On-Line Books Page
(http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html); a year ago today, the count was
less than half that.  There are still lots of *libraries* in remote
areas that have fewer books!

And there is still a largish backlog of books still to index, not
even counting all the new individual books and archives I keep finding
out about.

I found another interesting collection today: _Documenting the American
South_, over at the University of North Carolina.  It appears to be a
rapidly growing archive of autobiographies, memoirs, and narratives
by southerners at various points in history.  One of the more interesting
aspects of the collection (at least the part that I've seen so far)
are the memoirs of former slaves, writing about both their experiences
under slavery, and their life after gaining their freedom.  In many cases,
the accounts were actually written and published before the end of the
US Civil War, when slavery was still going on in the South.

Nearly every US schoolchild studies slavery in history class, but few of
them get to read first-person accounts of what it was like for the slaves
themselves.  (Many of these books could previously only be found in a few
university libraries.)  Now, with the books on-line, the stories can
be preserved and read by millions around the world.

I'm still in the process of exploring the collection; unfortunately,
the server that it uses is heavily loaded, and is sometimes either
inaccessible or slow.  But I entered the collection in the Autobiographies
section, which you can find at

  http://sunsite.unc.edu/docsouth/autobiog.html

From there, it looks like you should be able to get to other parts
of the collection, when the server is available.  (I'll be listing
relevant books in my index as I'm able to retrieve and catalog them.)

John