History Collections

Collecting Goals	Government Information	Newspaper Collections	UNC Web Sites
Reference Collections	Media Collections	Special Collections	Other Web Sites
Electronic Collections	Microform Collections	Related Collections	Library Contacts
General Collections			Faculty Library Liaison

Collecting Goals:

The history collections support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Department of History and in other departments and programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also serve as a resource for the people of the State. The collections offer hundreds of thousands of titles in all formats and are particularly strong in the areas of specialization within the Department.

Reference Collections:

The Library has extensive reference materials to support the study of history. Access to many of the major abstracting and indexing tools is available online, notably America, History and Life and Historical Abstracts. Printed works are located primarily in the Reference Department of Davis Library. The Library also has an unusually large number of manuscript catalogs. E-Reference materials are a good place to begin work in history, while subject guides and tutorials facilitate exploration in depth in selected areas. For further information about reference materials or help using them, please consult the Reference staff.

Electronic Collections:

The Library provides remote access to tens of thousands of retrospective titles that are important to the study of history. They include the Patrologia Latina Database, which contains the texts of the Latin Fathers from Tertullian (A.D. 200) to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. Early English Books Online (EEBO) and The Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) collectively cover 250,000 works published in the British Isles between 1475 and 1800. Early American Imprints I (Evans) and II (Shaw-Shoemaker) contain 75,000 items published in North America between 1639 and 1819. UNC Library's own digitization project, Documenting the American South, focuses on Southern culture and history. Specialized full-text databases of historical newspapers are also available. They appear under "News" in "Article Databases" and include the New York Times Historical Newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution Historical Newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective, and African American Newspapers: The 19th Century. Information about electronic journals related to history is available on a collected list. However, the best way to find information about individual electronic serials is to enter a title search on the Library's "E-Journal Finder" web page. For further information about these titles, please consult the Reference staff. To request a database or serial, please contact the West European Bibliographer.

General Collections:

The collections of primary sources and secondary literature related to the study of history are distinguished and cover most of the themes, periods, and peoples of the discipline. Particular strengths are ancient history; European history; global history; history of science; history of women; Latin American history; military history; Russian and East European history; and United States history, especially the history of the American South and African Americans. In an increasingly interdisciplinary environment, materials to support broad themes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, and imperialism; cross-cultural exchange and diasporic study; cultural history; economic and business history and thought; history of religion; history of revolutions; intellectual history; political traditions; social history; and war and society are also well represented. Works that supplement the study of history include resources on the intellectual tradition, theory, methodology, and current practice of history as a discipline. Library resources in these fields are available in English, the major European languages, Chinese, and Japanese. A list of current print subscriptions in the discipline is available. For further information on these topics or to request a title, please consult the West European Bibliographer.

Government Information:

Campus libraries provide online access to the major index and abstracting databases for government information, notably the GPO Monthly Catalog (GPO), which contains more than 450,000 records for all types of government documents printed by the US government. Major full-text and statistical databases are also available, including LexisNexis Congressional, which is a comprehensive source of current and historical bills, testimony, and reports from the US Congress going back to the founding of the republic in 1789. The Documents Section located in the Reference Department of Davis Library holds over three million print and microfilm items from the federal government, U.S. states, and international intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations and World Bank. Foreign government printed documents are housed in the Davis stacks. For further information about government publications or help using them, please consult the Documents Staff. Online information about North Carolina is available through NC Information Resources, while the North Carolina Collection has the most complete holdings of printed documents for the state. The Law Library contains extensive electronic and paper collections of federal and state legal publications, such as codes and statutes.

Media Collections:

The Media Resources Center in the House Undergraduate Library has more than 12,000 feature and documentary films, hundreds of screenplays, music, and other materials related to U.S. history, world history, ancient history, Asian history, and European history that are accessible by title, country of origin, genre, and director. For further information about this collection, please consult the Media Resources Librarian.

Microform Collections:

The Microform Reading Room has tens of thousands of titles of potential interest to faculty and students studying the history of the United States and France, Germany, Great Britain, Latin America, and the Middle Ages. They include U. S. presidential papers; state and official papers, particularly from the United States and Great Britain; other governmental and institutional publications; personal papers; manuscript collections; theses and monographs; historical periodicals; and the backfiles of important newspapers. For further information about microforms or help using them, please consult the Reference staff. To request a title, please contact the West European Bibliographer.

Newspaper Collections:

Current newspapers arrive daily in the Serials Reading Room. The Library acquires at least one print newspaper and microform backfile from each of the major regions of the country, with emphasis on the Southeast. It also subscribes to more than 40 foreign newspapers from Europe, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, and China to support academic programs in those areas and provide their perspectives on this country. To request a title, please contact the West European Bibliographer.

Special Collections:

The Manuscripts Collection houses the Southern Historical Collection (SHC), which contains 15,000,000 items organized in more than 4,600 discrete collections that include unique primary documents, such as diaries, journals, letters, correspondence, photographs, maps, drawings, ledgers, oral histories, moving images, albums, scrapbooks, and literary manuscripts covering the eighteenth- through the twentieth-century South. The SHC offers strong documentation of all periods of southern history since the late eighteenth century. Subject strengths are the Antebellum plantation era; the Civil War and Reconstruction; the New South; the Jim Crow South; and the South since 1954; business, the Civil Rights era, communities, family, journalism, labor, literature, politics, race relations, religion and religious communities, slavery, and social activism. For further information, please contact the Manuscripts Department.

The Maps Collection houses over 250,000 maps. It collects general reference materials, atlases, gazetteers, cartographic reference volumes, CD-ROMs, mapping software, journals, microforms, transparencies, and government depository publications. For further information, please contact the Maps Librarian.

The North Carolina Collection has unmatched resources for the study of the culture and history of the state. It holds over a quarter of a million printed items and more than a half million photographs and artifacts documenting the history and literature of North Carolina and its people. The collection spans the entire range of the state's written history, from 16th-century accounts by European explorers to present-day histories, novels, and newspapers. An imprint file for items printed in North Carolina through 1880, with access by both date and place of publication, are additional resources for faculty and students. For further information, please consult the reference staff of the North Carolina Collection.

The Rare Book Collection in Wilson Library has significant holdings of materials pertaining to history. Its 150,000 printed volumes, 18,000 broadsides and prints, and 1,200 manuscripts cover the full range of human knowledge. The Rare Book Collection is especially proud of its holdings of incunabula, sixteenth-century imprints, and French history. Other special strengths include Spanish Cronistas, World Wars I & II, publishing history, and the Southern Pamphlet Collection. For further information, please consult the Curator of the Rare Book Collection.

Related Collections:

Collections in most areas of the humanities and social sciences contribute to the strengths of the history collections, particularly African and African American Studies, American Studies, Asian Studies, Classics, Folklore, International and Area Studies, Women's Studies, and Peace, War, and Defense extend library holdings related to history. Perkins Library, at Duke University, also has extensive collections of these materials. Users can therefore expect to find most of the resources they need in the area. The Center for Research Libraries [CRL] supplements these holdings with additional microform collections related to history, particularly foreign dissertations and government publications, books and periodicals in languages other than English, newspapers published abroad, ethnic newspapers published in North America, and large microform sets (especially for foreign area studies). UNC faculty and students can request unlimited amounts of materials from CRL via the web and keep them indefinitely, or until another person needs them. For further information, please consult the West European Bibliographer.