Resources

This online textbook is designed for grade 8 and up and covers all of North Carolina history, from the arrival of the first people some 12,000 years ago to the 21st century. There are eleven parts, organized chronologically, a collection of primary sources, readings, and multimedia that can be rearranged to meet the needs of the classroom. Special web-based tools aid reading and model historical inquiry, helping students build critical thinking and literacy skills.

People have lived in North Carolina for at least 15,000 years. This site tells the story of who these people were, how they lived, and who they are today.

Carolina K-12 is a program of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Public Humanities and works to extend the resources of the University to North Carolina’s K-12 educators. They offer quality professional development programs which include access to scholars on key topics, innovative lesson plans, and interactive pedagogical training. In addition, Carolina K-12 offers hundreds of engaging and ready-to-implement lesson plans and activities for use in K-12 classrooms, all of which are available for free download in their Database of K-12 Resources.

Carolina K-12 believes that it is essential that teachers learn, openly discuss and responsibly teach about our nation’s shared “hard history” to ensure students understand the implications of our past, their direct connections to our present, and are empowered to address the challenges of the future. To support North Carolina’s dedicated K-12 scholars seeking to bravely disrupt the simplistic narratives and myths often promoted in textbooks and classic history education, Carolina K-12 launched the “Teaching Hard History” initiative in 2018. Based upon the recommendations of the seminal report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Teaching the Hard History of American Slavery, Carolina K-12 has worked with various community partners to provide teachers with FREE, high quality and interactive workshops that provide a mixture of vetted historical content, effective pedagogical strategies, and protective measures to employee for addressing “hard history” and potentially controversial current events in the classroom.

Carolina Public Humanities, a unit of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, offers engaging and innovative public seminars and lectures on a variety of topics and themes throughout the year. Our programs draw upon the humanities to nurture a deeper understanding of history and culture, enrich the life of the mind, and contribute to the development of a more humane world.

The Center for the Study of the American South (CSAS) was founded in 1992 by UNC to support scholarship on different aspects of the region the historical, cultural, economic, social, and political – and their intersections.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, 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.

Digitized historic photographs, advertisements, texts & more from Duke's unique library collections. Some collections to highlight are:

The LGBTQ Digital Collection is comprised of miscellaneous materials documenting the Georgia LGBTQ community. Materials in this collection represent a wide-ranging assortment of topics and events. LGBTQ materials can also be found in a variety of other including collections, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographs Collection, the Archives for Research on Women and Gender, and the Franklin Abbott Papers.

A History of LGBTQ+ Durham

Welcome to Love and Liberation: A History of Durham’s LGBTQ+ Community, a brief history including but not limited to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. While Durham has had its share of the nationally renowned, most notably Mandy Carter, Mab Segrest, Carl Wittman, and Pauli Murray, this site is concerned with how the players on the local stage sought justice, built community, and made authentic lives for themselves.

The North Carolina General Assembly created the African American Heritage Commission (AAHC) in 2008 to “assist the Secretary of Cultural Resources in the preservation, interpretation, and promotion of African American history, arts, and culture.” With this legislation the AAHC has identified African American heritage practitioners, such as curators, docents, and museum directors, as priority service populations. The AAHC was recognized as a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources in 2017, after being housed in the the Office of Archives and History and the North Carolina Arts Council. The commission works across the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to achieve the mission of preserving, protecting, and promoting North Carolina’s African American history, art, and culture, for all people.

The North Carolina Museum of History, located in downtown Raleigh, showcases more than 14,000 years and 150,000 artifacts of N.C. history, from native inhabitants to the 20th century. Dozens of exhibits are on display focusing on a variety of eras in state history, and there are always new exhibits to come and visit. They also have dozens of online activities and exhibits for use in the K-12 classroom.

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.

The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 5000 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1865. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. The NCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database.

Scalawag is a journalism and storytelling organization that illuminates dissent, unsettles dominant narratives, pursues justice and liberation, and stands in solidarity with marginalized people and communities in the South. Online, in person, and through our family of engaged members, Scalawag reimagines the roots and futures of the place we call home.

The stories we tell matter and move conversations forward. Our programs create rich connections among Southerners and throughout the South: between writers and readers, changemakers and communities; from urban to rural, from local to state. Together, we lay the groundwork for social change.

The SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work is a collaborative project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “Snick”) Legacy Project, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and Duke University Libraries. This documentary website tells the story of how young activists in SNCC united with local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for change that empowered the Black community and transformed the nation. SNCC organizers themselves shaped the vision and framework of the SNCC Digital Gateway website. They worked collaboratively with historians of the Movement, archivists, and students to weave together grassroots stories, digitized primary source materials held at repositories across the country, and new multi-media productions to bring this history to life for a new generation.

Since 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has worked to preserve the voices of the southern past. We have collected 6,000 interviews with people from all walks of life—from mill workers to civil rights leaders to future presidents of the United States. Made available through UNC’s renowned Southern Historical Collection online, these interviews capture the vivid personalities, poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that bring history to life.

Teaching Hard History, a groundbreaking report from the Southern Povery Law Center, found that schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

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.

The North Caroliniana Society, due to their commitment to support our state’s K-12 teachers, partnered with Carolina K-12, a program of Carolina Public Humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill, to develop the William Friday Teacher Education Initiative. The goal of the initiative’s programs and offerings are to equally educate, appreciate and affirm North Carolina’s hardworking educators as the impactful and important professionals they are. The Friday Initiative sponsors free, high quality retreats and other professional development programs, as well as supports the development of ready to use curriculum for the K-12 classroom.

These unique materials from UNC-Chapel Hill's Wilson Special Collections Library were digitized for research, teaching, and discovery. Some collections are the result of collaborations with UNC faculty members, partner libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions. This is a partial list of all materials digitized from Wilson Special Collections Library.

The story of the American South is big, bold and expansive. It demands to be told in a dramatic setting. Through an innovative partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South and Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, audiences can now immerse themselves in a brief story of the South’s past, present and future in the Planetarium’s fulldome film, “Tales of the American South.” Funded by the Kenan Charitable Trust, the UNC Office of the Provost, and Mr. John Powell, the 26 minute fulldome show provides stunning visuals, voices and music, situating and immersing the audience in place and time.