This compilation of printed texts from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women, African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. An award from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition supported the digitization of 101 titles published during and after the Civil War. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supplemented these titles with another forty first-person narratives, many published before 1860.