The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1925

Related Resources

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Documenting the American South

The Church in the Southern Black Community is one component of a growing collection of texts illustrating Southern history, literature, and culture. Other components include:

• First-Person Narratives of the American South   [also available through American Memory]
• North American Slave Narratives
• Library of Southern Literature
• The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865

In American Memory

• Other Collections Illustrating the Relationship of Religion to the African-American Experience
• Other Collections Relating to Churches and Religion
• Other Collections of Texts Relating to the History of a Region

Other Collections Illustrating the Relationship of Religion to the African-American Experience

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909

Complementary collections of pamphlets on topics that include slavery, African colonization, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. The materials include sermons and organizational reports from churches. Among the authors represented are ministers, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love. Writings of Frederick Douglass, Kelly Miller, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett are also represented.

The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920

This selection of manuscript and printed text and images drawn from the collections of the Ohio Historical Society illuminates the history of black Ohio from 1850 to 1920, a story of slavery and freedom, segregation and integration, religion and politics, migrations and restrictions, harmony and discord, and struggles and successes.

Other Collections Relating to Churches and Religion

Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

This collection of Sunday school books documents the culture of religious instruction of youth in America during the Antebellum era. Among the topics featured are history, holidays, slavery, African Americans, Native Americans, travel and missionary accounts, death and dying, poverty, temperance, immigrants, and advice.

Early Virginia Religious Petitions

Images of 423 petitions submitted to the Virginia legislature between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty counties and cities are drawn from the Library of Virginia's Legislative Petitions collection. The petitions concern such topics as the historic debate over the separation of church and state championed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the rights of dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists, the sale and division of property in the established church, and the dissolution of unpopular vestries.

Other Collections of Texts Relating to the History of a Region

"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

Full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts covering the decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century.

Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910

A portrait of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century through first-person accounts, biographies, promotional literature, local histories, ethnographic and antiquarian texts, colonial archival documents, and other works drawn from the Library of Congress's collections.

The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925

This collection includes first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures, and books of photographs that capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives

This collection portrays the early history of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico through first-person accounts, political writings, and histories. Among the topics it highlights are the land and its resources, relations with Spain, the competition among political parties, reform efforts, and recollections by veterans of the Spanish-American War.