Microforms: Major Sets by Subject: Latin America and Southern U.S.
List of major microform collections by subject available in the Kelley Center of Fondren Library. Click on the title to access additional information and resources when available, such as indexes, guides, or electronic sources.
OneSearch will find books, e-books, periodicals, films, music scores and CDs, audio recordings, government publications, archival materials, maps, as well as individual journal or newspaper articles.
Microfilm.
UPA’s Special Studies provide assessments by U.S. experts on far-ranging topics of national, regional, and global concern. Students and researchers worldwide who are interested in international relations will find much authoritative material to further their understanding and stimulate their own thinking.
The authors of these special studies are associated with several of the finest research facilities in the United States: the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, the Naval War College’s Center for Advanced Research, the National Defense University, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Army Command and General Staff College, the American Institutes for Research, and major international institutes at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Georgetown, MIT, and Yale.
Microfiche Gov CT1345 .A7- CT1345 .A73.
Dates of birth, dates of death, occupations, geographical data, and sources on historical figures connected to Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Ranging from the early 17th century to 1995, the three microfiche editions Archivo Biógrafico de España, Portugal e Iberoamérica (ABEPI) I, II and III contain biographical entries from 866 reference works, comprising a total of 2,000 volumes. Biographical encyclopedias and handbooks, scattered all over the world, were utilized for this project. Consisting of 2,633 microfiches, this collection provides a unique overview of the cultural, economic and social phenomena, which have shaped the life and history of Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The Archives facilitate access to some 480,000 biographical entries, providing information on 340,000 individuals.
See "more..." below for a detailed description of each part. See the catalog record for a shorter description and a link to the online guide.
Paper Guide: Gov Ref F213 .R42
Microfilm. Papers from Southern plantations. Includes correspondence, wills, deeds, business records, and many other materials.
Series A. Selections from the South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina
Part 1: The Papers of James Henry Hammond, 1795-1865
Drawn from major repositories throughout the South, these primary documents are rich resources for scholars. They open new directions for research on plantations as economic and social systems, values and culture among the southern elite, slavery and emancipation, women's roles, life among the yeoman class, marketing of staple crops, national politics, southern politics, the Civil War, and myriad other aspects of the antebellum period. Because the plantation was a commercial enterprise, record keeping was essential. Many planters kept journals, crop books, overseers' journals, and account books in remarkable detail. Family members often kept personal diaries and corresponded extensively with friends and relatives near and far. Series A., P art 1 features the comprehensive papers of James Henry Hammond, a prominent planter and a secessionist leader in the U.S. Senate. Though his reputation was tainted by scandal in his time, Hammond remains famous today for arguing that "Cotton is King" in the South on the Senate floor. The second chapter of the Hammond family saga is told in Records of Southern Plantations from Emancipation to the Great Migration, Series C, Part 1: The Hammond Family Papers.
Part 2: Miscellaneous Collections
Series A, Part 2 contains valuable records of plantation owners from every region of South Carolina, from the rice plantations of the coastal lowlands to the cotton plantations of the central "upcountry" and Piedmont, with selections highlighting the westward expansion of 19th-century plantations.
Series B. Selections from the South Carolina Historical Society
Papers of families and individuals from the South Carolina low country are included in Series B, with a concentration of materials from St. John's Parish of the Charleston District. Also included are several outstanding plantation diaries including that of a low country minister, the Reverend Alexander Glennie.
Series C. Selections from the Library of Congress
Part 1: Virginia
Series C, Part 1 reproduces the correspondence and records of several Virginia planters, including William B. Randolph, Hill Carter, and James Bruce, which illustrate agricultural innovations, financial dealings, and details of plantation life.
Part 2: Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina
Series C, Part 2 contains papers from a great swath of the south, including the documents of two prominent South Carolina attorneys. Edward Frost owned several plantations himself and represented other major planters. The Franklin Elmore papers document the use of slaves in antebellum industrial firms such as iron foundries.
Series D. Selections from the Maryland Historical Society
Series D is distinguished by several rich 18th-century collections and by materials from plantations on which there were fewer than ten slaves. There are also significant antebellum women's diaries.
Series E. Selections from the University of Virginia Library
Part 1: Virginia Plantations
Series E, Part 1 is remarkable for the age, variety, and abundant detail of its selections. Several collections permit study of plantation practices prior to the closing of the transatlantic slave trade.
Part 2: Virginia Plantations
Series E, Part 2 is dominated by the papers of the Berkeley family from 1653 to 1865. The collection is exceptionally comprehensive for both the 18th and 19th centuries on such matters as land and crop sales, slave and medical accounts, and family and overseers' correspondence.
Part 3: Virginia Plantations
Series E, Part 3 contains two complementary collections from the southern border counties of Virginia -- materials from the "Southside Virginia" families of Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Franklin, Pittsylvania, Halifax, and Mecklenburg counties, and materials from the Bruce family of Halifax, Pittsylvania, and Roanoke counties.
Part 4: Cocke Family Papers
Series E, Part 4 includes several related collections concerning the notable Cocke family of Fluvanna County, Virginia. The papers of the Cockes, with plantations in Virginia and Alabama, and the related Barraud family, Faulcon family, and other families, consist of ca. 25,000 items from the period 1725- 1939.
Part 5: Ambler Family Papers
Series E, Part 5 concerns the related Ambler and Barbour families of Amherst and Orange counties, Virginia. Personal and business papers (largely of John Jaquelin Ambler and of his father-in-law, Philip Pendleton Barbour) deal with the estate Glen Ambler in Amherst.
Part 6: Virginia Plantations
Series E, Part 6 consists of over fifty collections documenting families and plantations in all parts of Virginia, as well as Alabama, Mississippi, and other states. Correspondence, plantation diaries, account books, and other records concern plantation life, slaves and slavery, family life, health and medicine, religion, and other aspects of life in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Series F. Selections from the Duke University Library
Part 1: The Deep South
Series F, Part 1 features records that depict the opening of the southern frontier in response to the cotton boom of the early 19th century. Among the exceptional collections are the papers of Henry Watson and Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama.
Part 2: South Carolina and Georgia
Series F, Part 2 includes materials from the low-country plantations of absentee "rice barons." These collections shed light on the condition of slaves as well as on the society and economy of Charleston and Savannah.
Part 3: North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia
Series F, Part 3 covers the upper South. It contains some of the most copious documentation on the interstate slave trade offered in the entire series. In addition, Part 3 reproduces several exceptionally rich 18th-century collections.
Part 4: North Carolina and Virginia Plantations
Drawn from twenty-five collections, Series F, Part 4 documents plantations in the Old North State, the Old Dominion, and adjacent areas of the South. Topics include tobacco culture, slaves and slavery, social life and travel, material culture, education, family life, women's studies, and other aspects of the antebellum South.
Part 5: William Patterson Smith Collection
Series F, Part 5 comprises the personal and business papers of William Patterson Smith (1796-1878), merchant and planter. Approximately one-half of the material pertains to the business records of the mercantile firm of William Patterson Smith and Thomas Smith in Gloucester and the grain trade throughout the Chesapeake area. Among the material are correspondence, bills and receipts, notes, bills of lading, orders, sales accounts, chancery court records, writs, estate papers, account books, indentures, wills, inventories, bank books, stock certificates, and bonds.
Series G. Selections from the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Part 1: Texas and Louisiana Collections
Foremost among the numerous Texas collections in Series G, Part 1 are the Perry family papers, which document the family's migration to colonial Texas from Missouri as part of the Stephen F. Austin party and deal with such matters as land acquisition, sugar and cotton cultivation, plantation management, and slave ownership.
Part 2: William Massie Collection
Series G, Part 2 contains the papers of William Massie. A compulsive record keeper, Massie carefully documented every aspect of his plantation affairs from 1820 through 1865 in 188 volumes of diverse records and letters.
Part 3: Bank of the State of Mississippi Records, 1804-1846
Series G, Part 3 covers the voluminous papers of the Bank of the State of Mississippi. The bank, headquartered at Natchez and with branches at Port Gibson, Vicksburg, and Woodville, was chartered by area planters and conducted much of their financial business. Documents in the collection include correspondence about the credit extended to planters for plantation operations and the purchase of land and slaves, with much discussion of the notes of individual planters. Letters from institutions in Baltimore, Louisville, Nashville, New Orleans, and Philadelphia show how cash, commodities, and credit flowed throughout the antebellum United States.
Part 4: Winchester Family Papers, 1783-1906
Series G, Part 4 consists of the records of a family of Natchez lawyers. George Winchester, a native of Massachusetts, moved to Mississippi around 1820. In partnership with Sturges Sprague and later on his own, Winchester developed a legal practice representing the prominent landowners and slaveholders of the Natchez area. He also developed political ties and served as a state supreme court justice and legislator. His nephew, Josiah Winchester, joined him in his Natchez practice in 1835. Josiah married Margaret Sprague, a daughter of George Winchester's former partner, with whom he had 12 children. The younger Winchester later served as a judge. Records in Part 4 include correspondence, financial papers, and legal documents relating to innumerable plantations, slavery, and estate fiduciary transactions. Clients and correspondents include John Minor, Archibald Dunbar, Stephen Duncan, Wade Hampton, John A. Quitman, and the Natchez Rail Road Co.
Part 5: Natchez Trace Collection – Other Plantation Collections
Series G, Part 5: Other Plantation Collections includes more than 70 separate collections that provide a panorama of the plantation society of Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as documentation of emigration to Arkansas and Texas and immigration from South Carolina, Virginia, and other states. Many small collections in Part 5 provide insights into specific components of plantation life and culture. There are also new materials on many of the large planters featured in previously filmed collections, as well as the small planters and unheralded widows and orphans whose affairs are chronicled in this stellar material.
Series H. Selections from the Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University, and the Louisiana State Museum Archives
Series H contains several rich collections of sugar planters in southern Louisiana, including rare records of two free black slaveholders. The papers of John McDonough detail the commercial development of the New Orleans area, and the minute books of the Citizens Bank reveal the network between planters and "land banks." Also included are important Georgia and South Carolina plantation records of the Jones and Colcock families.
Series I. Selections from Louisiana State University
Part 1: Louisiana Sugar Plantations
The collections in Series I, Part 1 document the sugar barons' regime at the turn of the 19th century and the spectacular growth in productivity and wealth under the slave labor system.
Part 2: Louisiana and Miscellaneous Southern Cotton Plantations
In Series I, Part 2 several rich collections from East and West Feliciana Parishes chronicle Louisiana's cotton kingdom. The largest collection in the group, the papers of Nathaniel Evans, offers a detailed record of life on the lower Mississippi River from the turn of the 19th century to the Civil War.
Part 3: The Natchez Area
The records making up Series I, Part 3 enable researchers to study this remarkable Mississippi locale, at one time home of more millionaires for its size than any other city in the country. Highlight collections include the papers of Lemuel P. Conner, William N. Mercer, and New Orleans factor and commission merchant William Kenner.
Part 4: Barrow, Bisland, Bowman, and Other Collections
Series I, Part 4 reproduces seven collections that focus on important cotton plantations along the east bank of the Mississippi River, especially between Natchez, Mississippi, and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Many of these planters also held extensive interests in sugar estates in southern Louisiana.
Part 5: Butler Family Collections
Series A, Part 5 includes eight manuscript collections that document the family of Judge Thomas Butler and Ann (Ellis) Butler of The Cottage, a cotton plantation in West Feliciana Parish. Among the earliest Protestant immigrants to the region, the Butlers and their relations held massive sugar plantations in Terrebonne Parish. Their papers provide details of the lives of plantation owners and African American laborers from the antebellum era through the Civil War and postwar eras.
Part 6: David Weeks and Family Collection
In Series I, Part 6: he echoes of a lost world reverberate in the records of the Weeks family. Their plantation, Shadows on the Teche, in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, remains an archetypal home visited by thousands each year. David Weeks built the Shadows shortly before his death in 1834. His widow, Mary Clara Conrad Weeks, and their family continued to make a home there. The family's personal letters and regular overseers' correspondence chart the seasonal rhythms of a sugar plantation and the life cycles of people connected with it. Diet, health, clothing, family relations and activities, slave insurrections and rebellions, relations with overseers, and work regimens are among the topics of discussion and concern.
Series J. Selections from the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
Part 1: The Cameron Family Papers
Series J, Part 1 charts the rise of a plantation family from 1770, when the family ran a country store along an Indian trail in central North Carolina, through the establishment of a plantation in 1778 followed by regular increases in land and slaves. The Cameron papers document women's success in managing large plantations during the men's absences, complicated legal agreements in upper-class marriages, slave genealogies, and the material culture of the times.
Part 2: The Pettigrew Family Papers
Series J, Part 2 begins in the 18th century and recounts the history of an influential coastal North Carolina family of planters, ministers, intellectuals, military officers, and politicians. The candor of the Pettigrew letters on slavery has been of enormous value to historians of the Old South for more than a generation.
Part 3: South Carolina
In Series J, Part 3: South Carolina, the plantation records are especially rich sources for the study of lowland cotton and rice plantations in Georgetown, Charleston, Colleton, and Beaufort districts. The pre-Revolutionary letterbook of a Charleston commission merchant and his correspondence with British merchants and absentee plantation owners is an exceptional source for the study of international commerce and plantation management. Upland plantations of Abbeville, Chesterfield, Claremont, Clarendon, Darlington, Fairfield, Kershaw, Pendleton, Richland, and Sumter districts are also well represented in the new selections. Planters here often owned several separate estates managed by other family members or overseers.
Part 4: Georgia and Florida
In Series J, Part 4: Georgia and Florida, the cotton and rice plantation records of lowland Georgia come from Bryan, Chatham, Glynn, and Liberty counties. The Georgia upland cotton plantations represented were in Baker, Baldwin, Bibb, Burke, Cass, Clarke, Habersham, Jasper, Jones, Murray, Morgan, and Muscogee counties. Florida cotton plantation records are from Alachua and Leon counties. As in South Carolina, Georgia Sea Island cotton and rice plantations were usually vast enterprises worked by huge slave forces. Upland Georgia and Florida cotton plantations often encompassed large acreages divided into several noncontiguous operating units and were managed by overseers.
Part 5: Louisiana
Louisiana plantation records in Series J, Part 5: Louisiana document sugar culture in the parishes of Ascension, Iberia, Iberville, Plaquemines, Point Coupe, St. Mary, and Terrebonne and cotton growing in Caldwell, Natchitoches, Rapides, St. Joseph, Tensas, and West Feliciana parishes. In addition, the Louisiana selections include merchants' extensive correspondence on the ever-changing cotton and sugar markets.
Part 6: Mississippi and Arkansas
Series J, Part 6 highlights Natchez, where so much of the cotton wealth became concentrated. Natchez is the origin of valuable family papers documenting the lives of Norton, Chilton, Dameron, Minor, Guion, and Quitman family members. Business records include the William Dunbar account book and the extensive George Washington Sargent letterbooks.
Part 7: Alabama
Every section of the state is represented in Series J, Part 7 and, through business and family connections, activities in virtually every other southern state are often covered.
Part 8: Tennessee and Kentucky
Cotton, tobacco, and mixed farming enterprises in these border states dominate the economic aspects of records in Series J, Part 8. The migration of North Carolina and Virginia planters across the Blue Ridge mountains is a subtheme, with rich family correspondence from both sides of the divide.
Part 9: Virginia
In Series J, Part 9 plantation records reflect the primacy of tobacco, always its chief commercial crop, though grain and livestock were also important. Documentation extends from the early 18th century (in the Charles William Dabney papers and Fredericks Hall Plantation books) through the Civil War.
Part 10: Hubard Family Papers, 1741-1865
Series J, Part 10 includes the Hubard Family Papers, 1741-1865. Spanning more than a century, the Hubard manuscript material centers on the family of Edmund Wilcox Hubard of Saratoga Plantation, Buckingham County, Virginia. The collection comprises business and personal papers of Hubard's forebears, relatives, friends, and business associates. In addition to correspondence, account books, and diaries, the Hubard papers include bills and receipts, personal notes, deeds and mortgages, wills, and records of land sales, estate settlements, and lawsuits.
Part 11: Hairston and Wilson Families
Series J, Part 11 covers the Hairston and Wilson families. These related families of tobacco planters and merchants lived in Southside Virginia and Piedmont North Carolina. Many of the Hairston and Wilson documents relate to slavery in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi, where some family members had moved to raise cotton. In the account books there are slave birth records, clothing allotments, and work records. Numerous documents refer to the purchase and sale of slaves. There is also extensive documentation of the overseer system.
Part 12: Tidewater and Coastal Plains North Carolina
In Series J, Part 12, twenty-nine collections from North Carolina's tidewater region and coastal plains document life in the eastern third of the state. Included is material on rice culture in the Cape Fear area and cotton growing in the Roanoke River valley. Other material relates to corn, tobacco, wheat, garden crops, animal husbandry, lumbering, and fisheries. There are also papers on immigration from England and Ireland, and emigration to and investments in cotton and sugar plantations in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
Part 13: Piedmont North Carolina
In Series J, Part 13, thirty-two collections document the tobacco and cotton culture in the heart of Carolina. Correspondence, diaries, and financial and legal papers concern planters in the Old North State and relatives living elsewhere in the South. Some early records refer to the activities of the Transylvania Company in present-day Kentucky and Tennessee.
Part 14: Western North Carolina
The five collections in Series J, Part 14 are from plantations in Wilkes, Burke, and McDowell counties. The Hamilton Brown Papers span three generations of a family in North Carolina and Tennessee. Relatives and business associates wrote regularly from locations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and Virginia. A massive diary covers 65 years in the life of planter James Hervey Greenlee. The business, family, and social records of James Gwyn, a merchant and court official as well as a planter, describe plantation life in western North Carolina.
Series K. Selections from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, the Shirley Plantation Collection, 1650-1888
Series K contains the Shirley Plantation collection, which comprises the papers of several generations of the preeminent Carter plantation family, in Charles City County, Virginia. The collection covers personal, family, and plantation life at Shirley, as well as naval history, the Civil War, religion, politics, agriculture, business, medicine, and more. Slavery is a prominent and recurring topic. Complementing the plantation and financial records is a large body of personal family correspondence. There are letters from brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents, and friends residing at Shirley, in other areas of Virginia, in Maryland, and elsewhere. Correspondents include Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Bishop James Madison, landscape artist Frederic E. Church, generals George B. McClellan and Benjamin Butler, and others.
Series L. Selections from the Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary
Part 1: Carter Papers, 1667-1862
Series L, Part 1 centers on the Carters of Sabine Hall in Richmond County, in Virginia's Northern Neck. These Carters were related to the Carters of Shirley Plantation. Correspondence of this period documents the close ties of business, friendship, and marriage between the Carters of Sabine Hall and the Tayloes of Mt. Airy, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. There are also records of family gatherings, horse races, barbecues, and other social events. Documents relating to the migration of Virginia planters to the new plantation regions of Alabama and the Southwest augment the extensive material on life in the Northern Neck. Papers concerning slavery include estate inventories, medical papers, letters to and from overseers, and more.
Part 2: Jerdone Family Papers, 1736-1918
Series L, Part 2 begins with business letters, letterbooks, and account books of immigrant Francis Jerdone (1721-1771), a Scottish factor who lived in Hanover County, Yorktown, and Louisa County, Virginia, and letters of his wife, Sarah Macon Jerdone. These early papers are among the finest extant sources for the study of the colonial plantation economy in Virginia and the tobacco trade with Europe. Most of the collection consists of letters, accounts, and diaries of the next two generations of the Jerdone family, with the majority dating from 1771 to 1845. Family members include Francis Jerdone (1756-1841), a Louisa County planter; his brother, John Jerdone (1764-1786), a Spotsylvania County planter; Alexander McCauley of Yorktown, brother-in-law of Francis Jerdone; and Francis's sons, John (b. 1800), Francis (b. 1802), and William (b. 1805).
Part 3: Skipwith Family Papers, 1760-1977
Series L, Part 3 includes business records, correspondence, accounts, and farm notes of Sir Peyton Skipwith (1740-1805); his wife, Lady Jean Miller Skipwith (1748-1826); their son, Humberston Skipwith (1791-1863); and Humberston's wives and children. The papers detail the management of Prestwould Plantation in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, an area dominated by tobacco culture. The development of Lady Jean Skipwith's outstanding library and the education and travel of various family members are well documented. Manuscript volumes relate to farm accounts, Lady Jean's interest in gardening, and the education of family members. While there is material from the 20th century, most of the documents are from the 19th, including rich postbellum material and detailed agricultural records up to the 1880s.
Part 4: Austin-Twyman Papers, 1765-1865 and Charles Brown Papers, 1792-1888
Series L, Part 4 provides voluminous documentation of Piedmont Virginia in the 19th century. These collections are particularly valuable sources for the study of slavery and the medical treatment of slaves. One collection even includes an index of items referring to slaves and slavery. The Austin-Twyman papers form the bulk of this part and are a rich but rarely explored source on slavery in 19th-century Virginia. There are seven slave letters in the collection, including one written by a woman to her son, Beverley. Other items tell more about Beverley's life. There are also documents on the care of a child while the mother, a slave, worked in the field; the sale of a child; slave hire agreements; permission for slaves to marry off the plantation; qualms about slave ownership; and profits or losses sustained through slavery in agriculture and industry.
Series M. Selections from the Virginia Historical Society
Part 1: Tayloe Family, 1650-1970
Series M, Part 1 contains voluminous records compiled by the Tayloe family on their vast land and slave holdings in Richmond County, King George County, and Prince William County, Virginia; Montgomery County and St. Mary's County in Maryland; and Hale County and Marengo County in Alabama. The journals, account books, correspondence, and other papers that five generations of Tayloes produced over a period of two centuries shed light on the personal and professional or workday lives of family, friends, and slaves, as well as agricultural and business practices in the Old South. There is also correspondence that relates to social, political, and business affairs in the District of Columbia from family members who lived there.
Part 2: Northern Neck of Virginia; also Maryland
Series M, Part 2: Northern Neck of Virginia; also Maryland documents early colonial plantations in the Northern Neck region and adjacent areas of Maryland. Many prominent Virginia families, such as the Carters, the Custises, and the Lees, are included here.
Part 3: Other Tidewater Virginia
Series M, Part 3: Other Tidewater Virginia concerns plantations in Tidewater areas of Virginia other than the Northern Neck. Drawn from twenty-one collections, Part 3 covers areas near Norfolk, the lower James River, the Peninsula of Virginia, and the Rappahannock River. Records come from families in circumstances ranging from vast wealth and influence to a more hardscrabble existence. Among the larger collections are the Bassett family papers (1650-1923), noteworthy for Betty Carter Brown Bassett's instructions to her son regarding the treatment of slaves.
Part 4: Central Piedmont Virginia
Series M, Part 4 covers Central Piedmont Virginia, a region that embraces an area of 18 counties in the heart of the Old Dominion, between the James and Rappahannock rivers and above the fall line. The papers in Part 4 are drawn from forty-six separate collections and concern tobacco and grain plantations, horse breeding, slaves and slavery, and the Central Piedmont's rich social and political life.
Part 5: Southside Virginia
Series M, Part 5: Southside Virginia covers the fifteen counties south of the James River and above the fall line. The forty-six collections in Part 5, drawn from this region, provide a comprehensive view of this distinctive area on the border of North Carolina. The remoteness of most of the plantations fostered particularly voluminous family correspondence. The suitable soils and large slave forces engendered strong business ties among area planters with the commercial centers of Virginia and the Atlantic seaboard. The papers and diaries strongly reflect the South's religious and social practices and include much documentation of the lives of women.
Part 6: Northern Virginia and Valley
Series M, Part 6 covers Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. Like other regions in the state, these areas developed their own unique variations of plantation agriculture. In both regions, agriculture was mixed, with significant grain cultivation and animal husbandry and limited cultivation of tobacco and hemp.
Series N. Selections from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Series N contains significant materials on Natchez and antebellum plantation culture in Mississippi and Louisiana.
See "more..." below for a detailed description of each part. See the catalog record for a shorter description and a link to the online guide.
Print Guide: Gov Ref F215 .R42
Microfilm. Papers from Southern plantations. Includes correspondence, wills, deeds, business records, and many other materials. Series A, Selections from the Rare Books, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke University, contains documents on Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida plantations. Series B, Selections from the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections at Louisiana State University Libraries, contains documents on Louisiana sugar and cotton plantations plus Mississippi cotton plantations, Albert Batchelor papers, and the Weeks family papers.
Series A: Selections from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
Part 1: Alabama and South Carolina Plantations
Alabama and South Carolina Plantations consists of eight manuscript collections from cotton and rice plantations. Papers relating to African Americans can be found throughout. The papers of Henry Watson, for example, include correspondence from his overseer documenting changing labor relations on his plantations. There is also rich documentation on women in postbellum society, particularly in the papers of Clement Claiborne Clay. His wife, Virginia Tunstall Clay ran their plantations in his absence and wrote regularly on wage negotiations with former slaves. She also mounted a campaign to free her husband from prison after he was accused of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
Part 2: North Carolina and Virginia Plantations
North Carolina and Virginia Plantations includes sixteen manuscript collections pertaining to cotton and tobacco plantations. Records of country storekeepers document their central role in plantation economics of the post–Civil War South.
Part 3: Georgia and Florida Plantations
Georgia and Florida Plantations comprises a single extraordinary collection, the Papers of John Flannery and Company, revealing the plight of thousands of cotton plantations throughout Florida and Georgia. Correspondence on debts, liens, mortgages, loans, and foreclosures provide insight into the credit system that developed after the Civil War between cotton brokers and their customers.
Series B: Selections from the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries
Part 1: Louisiana Sugar Plantations
Louisiana Sugar Plantations presents a valuable and complementary series of records of adjoining estates formed in a bend on the east bank of the Mississippi River “coast” upriver from New Orleans. The collections in this edition provide substantial documentation on the laborers that worked on these sugar plantations. Particularly rich in this regard are the Benjamin Tureaud Family Papers, which contain several different types of financial records that allow for an examination of the lives of sugar plantation laborers over a twenty-year period.
Part 2: Louisiana Cotton Plantations
Louisiana Cotton Plantations highlights the ethnic diversity of Louisiana cotton plantation owners and laborers. Several collections document African Americans and Creoles of color in northwestern Louisiana. There are also papers of French Acadian planters from the central prairie regions of the state. White planters in the eastern and northern parts of Louisiana round out this edition of plantation records.
Part 3: Louisiana Sugar Plantations (Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Teche)
Louisiana Sugar Plantations (Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Teche) covers the operation of Louisiana sugar plantations from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on the complicated transition from slavery to free labor, the negotiations between planters and laborers in making this transition, and the impact of this transition on Louisiana agriculture, the economy, and politics. This part also reveals the shift toward corporate control of sugar plantations in the early years of the twentieth century.
Part 4: Mississippi Cotton Plantations
Mississippi Cotton Plantations documents the older estates around Natchez, Woodville, Port Gibson, and Vicksburg. The collections included in Part 4 allow researchers to investigate the operation of the postbellum plantation as well as many other aspects of life during this period, including the experiences of African Americans and women, family matters, and political events.
Part 5: Albert Batchelor Papers
Albert A. Batchelor Papers dates from 1860 to 1898 and is organized into two main series: a series of correspondence and business records and a series of bound volumes, including diaries, ledgers, cash books, and memorandum books. Batchelor’s management of his plantations, particularly his relations with laborers and renters, as well as his dealings with commission merchants, are major themes in this collection. Batchelor was a Confederate veteran and physician, and he owned several plantations in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana.
Part 6: Weeks Family Papers
Documents changes in sugar culture between 1866 and 1920 in St. Martin, St. Mary, and New Iberia parishes, Louisiana.
Series C: Selections from the South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina
Part 1: The Hammond Family Papers
Hammond Family Collection follows the trajectory of James Henry Hammond's family after his death and the financial ruin of the Civil War, in documents dating from 1865 to 1935. In the first generation of papers the principal figures are Hammond's sons, Harry, Edward Spann, and Paul, who feuded with each other while struggling to support their families in the postwar years. In the second generation, Harry Hammond's daughters, Julia and Katharine, become the central characters of the collection, as they wrestled to balance education, romance, and family obligation. In the first years after the Civil War, the death of James Henry Hammond and management of his estate is an ever-present topic. The documents demonstrate the turmoil left in his wake, with his children, including his daughters Katherine and Elizabeth, fighting amongst themselves over the distribution of their greatly reduced inheritances. Other documents address Reconstruction, plantation operations, family dynamics, the cotton industry, women's education, courtship, the legal system, medicine, and war.
Part 2: Selected Collections
Selected Collections follows the path of several South Carolina families following the upheaval of the Civil War, in papers dating from 1865 to 1949. Operation of the plantation and production of saleable cotton and rice crops is the central theme of the publication. In plantation journals and correspondence with factors, plantation owners recorded everything from weather conditions, to fertilizer experiments, to precise amounts of cotton picked by individual laborers. The collections in this part capture the stories of many families, headed by traditional plantation owners, politicians, office workers, and professors, each struggling to find their place in a re-imagined South Carolina. Their papers address a variety of topics in postwar life, including continued resentment of the North, South Carolina politics, new business and industry, courtship, religion, and the experiences of women.
Records of the States of the United States of America
Paper Guide for this series: Gov Ref Z1223.5 .A1 U47
Individual states are cataloged separately. Please search the catalog for records for the following states:
Arkansas
Georgia
Mississippi
New York
North Carolina
Pennyslvania
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
In addition to the electronic version, microfiche filed by author (by title if no author) are available in the microform area, catalog number: E12 .L68
See "more..." below for a detailed description. See the catalog record for a shorter description.
Reel guide: Gov Ref HD 1511 .U5 S68 Suppl.
Print guide: Gov Ref HD 1511 .U5 S68
Microfilm. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union Papers (also called "The Green Rising") encompass a multitude of issues, movements, and individual histories on microform. A major acquisition for any library's social science collection, these papers can be used by scholars and researchers investigating the historical perspectives of the New Deal, farm labor, or Southern, Mexican-American, and American labor history.
Founded by seven black and eleven white sharecroppers on an Arkansas cotton plantation, the STFU laid the groundwork for and contributed to the creation of the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee in the U.S. Senate and the Kennedy-Johnson Administration's War on Poverty.
The entire history of this influential union can be traced, from its humble beginnings under the auspices of the Socialist Party, through its brief and stormy affiliation with the CIO; from its entry into the AFL up to its merger into another union in the 1960s.
A unique feature of this collection is the correspondence from sharecroppers to union officials. Notes scrawled on scraps of paper or penciled on the backs of outdated calendars tell of usurious landlords, sick children, and flood conditions.
Supplement to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union Papers, 1910-1977 This supplement to the papers of the STFU features the personal papers and records of four of farm labor's dynamic leaders.
H.L. Mitchell Papers--The private papers, subject files, and printed materials of STFU co-founder H.L. Mitchell include unpublished and out-of-print studies of Mexican-Americans, and his correspondence documents STFU's Socialist Party origins.
Clyde Johnson Papers--Documented is the life of Clyde Johnson, a dedicated trade unionist who was the last secretary to the Alabama Sharecroppers Union. Featured is an unpublished thesis by Dale Rosen, which documents the facts surrounding the Reeltown Massacre, as well as Johnson's oral history.
David S. Burgess Papers--Insight into the lives of migrant workers during the 1940s can be gathered through the papers of David Burgess--a minister who saved the homes of 600 families in the Delmo Labor Homes Project of Southeast Missouri. In later years, Burgess was a CIO organizer and head of the Georgia CIO.
Thomas H. Gibbons Papers--Gibbons' unpublished "Autobiography of a Technocrat" is based on the author's experiences as a migrant worker and his beliefs in radical economic theory.
See "more..." below for a detailed description. See the catalog record for a shorter description and a link to the online guide.
Print Guide: HQ 1418.S68 (.S682-S685)
Microfilm. A collection of writings by 19th Century Southern women. Topics covered include courtship, slavery, education, child rearing, marriage, and religion. Divided into series by letter and parts by number:
Series A, Holdings of the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Series B: Holdings of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library
Part 1: Mary Susan Ker of Linden Plantation, was a governess at Vicksburg, teacher in Natchez, and traveler of Europe and the United States. The earliest papers are those of her parents, John and Mary (Baker) Ker in Natchez.
Part 2: The diary of Mahala P. (Eggleston) Roach, which traces 50 years of life in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and includes comments on social life, domestic relations with slaves, family life, and the Civil War.
Part 3: The diaries and papers documenting the lives of other Louisiana and Mississippi women are drawn from eight manuscript collections. Commentaries on daily life and travel, thoughts on the status of women as property owners, reminiscences, and even poetry are among the contents of the collections. The collections include the papers of Charlotte Beatty, Madaline Selima Edwards, the Gale and Polk family, t he Gibson-Humphreys family, Ellen Louise Power, Catherine M. Pritchard, Sarah Lois Wadley, and Mary Susannah Winans.
Part 4: Spanning 1667-1903. Among the early papers are letters of Elizabeth House Trist, with family correspondence and letters to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Her grandson, Nicholas Philip Trist, married Virginia Jefferson Randolph, granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. Their courtship letters and correspondence among their relatives include descriptions of life at Monticello. Trist's eventful diplomatic career separated the family but spurred regular letter writing from children as well as parents. Civil War period letters reveal the divisions of feeling within the family.
Part 5: Georgia collections relate to members of the Brumby and Smith, Cornwall, Gift, Graves, Milligan, Mackay and Stiles, and Pember families. Alabama family names include Comer, Hentz, McCorkle, and Ulmer. There are collections from the Elmore and Mclver families of South Carolina and one small Florida collection relating to Julia McKinne (Foster) Weed.
Part 6: Covers five families. Included in the Beale and Davis family papers are diaries, moral reflections, and letters of Anne Turberville Beale Davis and her relatives, who were preachers and planters. The Henry Harrison Cocke papers include correspondence and diaries of Elizabeth Ruffin Cocke, a sister of Edmund Ruffin. The Francis Asbury Dickins papers contain many letters of Mrs. Dickins's Randolph family relations. The Hubard family papers feature the postwar activities of a woman writer and her planter family. The Susannah Gordon Waddell diary records the experiences of a physician's wife during the Civil War in Monroe County, now West Virginia.
Part 7: Consists of two related collections centered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina: papers of siblings Charles Phillips and Cornelia Phillips Spencer. These collections include family and personal correspondence and extensive women's diaries documenting life at the University of North Carolina and the university's struggle to stay open and then to reopen during Reconstruction.
Part 8: Twenty-four collections included which document the diversity of North Carolina family life during the 19th century. The stories of factors and physicians, planters and politicians, manufacturers and professionals, are told through the many families represented here.
Series B: Holdings of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library: The Carter Family Papers, 1888–1989.
Comprises the detailed records of women at Shirley Plantation on the James River in Charles City County, Virginia. In addition to the diaries there are several volumes with copied or original essays and poetry, address books, scrapbooks, and other items, as well as extensive family, personal, and social correspondence.
Series C: Holdings of The Earl Gregg Swem Library, The College of William and Mary in Virginia: Miscellaneous Collections, 1773–1938.
Includes twelve collections documenting a variety of women's experiences in Virginia from the Chesapeake Bay to the Shenandoah Valley. Antebellum, Civil War, and postwar periods.
Series D: Holdings of the Virginia Historical Society
Part 1: Contains documents from the Tidewater region including the voluminous 19th-century papers of the family of Mary Custis Lee of Arlington and New Kent counties. Child rearing, housekeeping, social life, and travel are among the topics covered. Correspondents include Mary Custis Lee's husband, Robert E. Lee, as well as her mother, mother-in-law, daughters, and other relatives.
Part 2: Documents the lives of several generations of women from the Chamberlayne family (1821- 1938), McCarthy family (1839-1865), Williams family (1811-1946), Young family (1835-1900), and other families that were centered in the Richmond metropolitan area.
Part 3: Documents the Piedmont regions of central, southern, northern, and western Virginia. The culture and traditions of many hundreds of individual women and their families are found in sixty-eight collections of papers.
Part 4: Drawn from nineteen manuscript collections, records the experiences of scores of women and their families and features the strength of home and hearth. From distant domiciles throughout the South, southern women reveal their culture, traditions, and individuality.
Series E: Holdings of Louisiana State University
Allows comparative study of family life and women's roles in the Anglo and French cultures of the Mississippi Valley. Researchers can chart family and social life through such collections as the Annie Jeter Carmouche Papers, 1853-1964, chronicling one woman's antebellum childhood in Virginia and New Orleans, her experience of the Civil War, and her postwar life in St. Landry and Bossier parishes; and the Emily Caroline Douglas Papers, 1855-1913, contrasting impressions of the South gained during her New England childhood with the South she came to know during the turbulence of the Civil War and its aftermath.
Series F: Holdings of the Center for American History University of Texas at Austin.
Correspondence, diaries, literary works, and other papers provide unique insight into their lives and spirit from colonial times, to antebellum, Civil War, and postwar years, and through the Victorian era. Scholars will value this collection for both its diversity of female experience and its continuity of family records through several generations.
Series G: Holdings of the University of Virgina Library
Part 1: Below the fall line in 19th-century Virginia, the course of women's lives flowed as various and changing as the seasons. In correspondence, diaries, and other papers, these southern women narrate their experiences across generations of family and over a century of life in the South.
Part 2: The 19th century brought many challenges—evolving technology and new modes of transportation, farming, and manufacture; the advent of formal education for women, leading to their greater expectations of independence; an increasingly volatile slave population that early in the 1800s outnumbered whites in the South; and the approaching shadow of war that would linger long after all the battles had been fought. The southern women in this part struggled to meet these challenges, often with great success. Their stories capture life above Virginia's fall line, as it was determined day to day over one hundred years.
Series H: Holdings of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University
Part 1: These papers follow women as they travel the social arch of their lives, from close female friendships, courtship and marriage to motherhood, and encounter the issues of their times: the Civil War, slavery, religious faith, education and descent into poverty. Combined with the constant threat of disease and child mortality, the collections often present women in states of crisis, searching for the means to hold themselves and their families together. Many voices are represented in the collections, including the compelling accounts of Emma Spaulding, wife of carpetbagger and newspaperman John Emory Bryant, Julia Blanche Munroe, wife of U.S. and Confederate naval officer John McIntosh Kell, author Clara Victoria Dargan MacLean, schoolteacher Isabella Anna Roberts Woodruff, and wealthy plantation owner and well-known diarist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas.
Part 2: The Clement Claiborne Clay papers and Washington M. Smith papers compose the majority of this part, while smaller collections consist of a few hundred documents or a single diary.
Part 3: Includes a number of Black voices, from business women Fannie B. Rosser and Josephine Leary to slaves of the Campbell and Mordecai families who dictated letters to their relations and owners.