A Public Good: Documenting the American South and Slave Narratives

Abstract

Documenting the American South (DAS) is an electronic publishing program of the University of North Carolina Library that provides public access to primary source materials related to Southern history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the twentieth century.¹ It includes mainly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century published texts, with large numbers of autobiographies, biographies, essays, travel accounts, poetry, diaries, letters, and memoirs. It also offers a few titles published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some manuscripts, images, and audio files. DAS currently includes ten thematic collections.²

The American South has a unique cultural . . .