Subject and Course Guides: U.S. History Up To 1865: The Road to Disunion

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The Road to Disunion

This page includes resources related to Early America and the antebellum period leading up to the American Civil War. You will find library resources such as books and journal through our library databases and our library catalog, as well as other internet resources to help with your research.

Course Materials

The American YAWP
A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook

Secondary Research - Databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Covers a large variety of topics and is recommended for most research projects. It contains articles from many academic journals, magazines, newspapers, and other credible sources.
Academic Search Complete is the world's largest scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database designed specifically for academic institutions. It provides access to more than 8,500 full-text journals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals, as well as indexing and abstracts of more than 12,500 journals and more than 13,200 books, reports, conference proceedings, etc. Subjects covered include: anthropology, arts and literature, computer sciences, education, engineering, ethnic studies, humanities, language and linguistics, law, medical sciences, social sciences, etc. Most content is available in printer-friendly, searchable PDFs. Updated daily.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections This link opens in a new window
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections include digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals from the American Antiquarian Society, the premier library documenting the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. This content is not available for acquisition in digital form from any source other than EBSCO Publishing, and keyword searching is available on all titles.
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections exists as a series of five databases created from a comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1876. These databases include 6,500 titles featuring more than 10 million pages of content from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century. The collection also contains titles in more than
two dozen languages including French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and more.
American Indian Newspapers This link opens in a new window
From historic pressings to contemporary periodicals, explore nearly 200 years of Indigenous print journalism from the US and Canada. With newspapers representing a huge variety in publisher, audience and era, discover how events were reported by and for Indigenous communities.
American Periodicals (1740 - 1940) This link opens in a new window
Provides access to full-text periodicals covering the American experience from the colonial era to the beginning of World War II.
American Periodical Series Online (APS Online) contains over 1,000 full-text periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals. Titles in this database include: Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine; the first American professional journals; America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular consumer magazines still in publication, such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and Ladies' Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's. Users are able to search the complete text, including tables of contents, by boolean and keyword operators. Articles are linked to the corresponding page images, downloadable in PDF format. Updated daily.
American West This link opens in a new window
Contains primary sources on the history of the American West, from 1722 to 1939, from the Newberry Library's Graff Collection of Western Americana. Includes manuscripts, broadsides, ephemeral materials, maps, and rare printed works.
American West provides extensive coverage on the history of the American West, including Texas history, from 1722 to 1939, with the heaviest concentration from 1830 to 1939. The database contains materials from the Newberry Library's Graff Collection of Western Americana on topics related to Native Americans, pioneers and homesteaders, mining, the Mormon Exodus, agriculture, transportation, outlaws, the environment, and border issues. Materials, most unique to this collection, include original manuscripts, ephemeral material (e.g., trade cards, wanted posters, photos, claim certificates, news-sheets, etc.), maps, and rare printed works. All textual materials are full-text searchable and can be viewed as transcripts or facsimiles (i.e., original format). Most maps are in color and have zooming functionality.

NOTE: Users can register for a personal account to store searches, create image slideshows, and build a library of documents.
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
A super-index to nineteenth century books, periodical, official documents, newspapers and archives.
C19: The Nineteenth Century is a source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. It's a super-index to more than 16 million documents that includes the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, and the British Periodicals. It links to other 19th century full-text sources in the UTA Library's collection such as American Periodical Series Online, Periodicals Archive Online and Palmer's Full-Text Online.
Gale OneFile: U.S. History This link opens in a new window
Provides access to scholarly journals and magazines useful to both novice historians as well as advanced academic researchers. Updated daily, this library resource offers balanced coverage of events in U.S. history and scholarly work established in the field.
Historical Abstracts (Full-Text) This link opens in a new window
Contains citations, abstracts, and full-text to literature on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life). NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive collection of over 620 full-text scholarly journals primarily from university presses and professional society publishers. Additional titles are added to the collection as back files are digitized. Subject areas include: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, History, History of Science Technology, Language Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Public Policy Administration, Science, Slavic Studies, Sociology, Statistics.
Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
Full-text articles published in the humanities and the social sciences. The scope is international and multi-disciplinary
Periodicals Archive Online is a major online periodical archive that makes the backfiles of periodical articles in the humanities and social sciences available electronically. It is a work in progress that covers the arts, the humanities and social sciences in 37 key subject areas. Available interface languages are English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian.
Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture and Law - HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
This collection brings together a multitude of legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. It includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery.

Secondary Research - In our Collection

The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered by Laura R. Sandy (Editor); Marie S. Molloy (Editor)
ISBN: 0429607512
Publication Date: 2019-02-05
Following the suggestion of the historian Peter Parish, these essays probe "the edges" of slavery and the sectional conflict.
The Civil War As Global Conflict by David T. Gleeson (Editor); Simon Lewis (Editor)
ISBN: 1611173264
Publication Date: 2014-04-23
A collection of essays highlighting the war not only as a North American conflict but as a global one In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns.
The Civil War in the West by Earl J. Hess
ISBN: 9780807835425
Publication Date: 2012-03-12
The Western theater of the Civil War, rich in agricultural resources and manpower and home to a large number of slaves, stretched 600 miles north to south and 450 miles east to west from the Appalachians to the Mississippi.
The Civil War on the Mississippi by Barbara Brooks Tomblin
ISBN: 0813167043
Publication Date: 2016-06-14
The naval historian presents a "well-written, fast-paced" study of Civil War riverine combat based on the personal accounts of officers and sailors (Civil War News).
Disunion! by Elizabeth R. Varon
ISBN: 0807871591
Publication Date: 2010-09-15
In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents.
Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War by Kristen Brill (Editor)
ISBN: 1315689812
Publication Date: 2021-05-12
Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War is a wide-ranging primary source collection that offers a compelling selection of upper-class, white Confederate women's voices from archives across the South.
Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War by Seed, David, editor.; Kenny, Stephen C. (Stephen Christopher), editor.; Williams, Chris (Research and knowledge exchange impact officer), editor. 2015
ISBN: 1781384266
Publication Date: 2015
The contemporary perspectives - fiction, first-hand accounts, reportage and photographs - found in the pages of this collection give a unique insight into the experiences and suffering of those affected by the American Civil War. The essays and recollections detail some of the earliest attempts by medical professionals to understand and help the wounded, and look at how writers and poets were influenced by their own involvement as nurses, combatants and observers.
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant; John F. Marszalek (Editor); David S. Nolen (As told to); Louie P. Gallo (As told to); Frank J. Williams (Preface by)
ISBN: 0674981898
Publication Date: 2017-10-16
This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making.
The Politics of Dissolution by Marshall DeRosa
ISBN: 1351290959
Publication Date: 2018-04-17
This collection of late antebellum U.S. Senate speeches exemplifies the official statements of the public men from the South, North, and West as they struggled with the questions of national identity and the right of self-government within the context of the rule of law.
Routledge Library Editions: America: Revolution and Civil War
ISBN: 1003124593
Publication Date: 2021-08-26
The volumes in this set, originally published between 1967 and 2011, available as ebooks for the first time, include succinct, accessible books on two of the most important periods of American history which offer concise treatment of these major historical topics, as well as some lengthier, finest single-volume studies of the American Civil and Revolutionary Wars ever written and an outstanding reference tool in a 2 volume Encyclopedia.
Women and the American Civil War by Judith Giesberg (Editor); Randall M. Miller (Editor)
ISBN: 1606353403
Publication Date: 2018-07-17
The scholarship on women's experiences in the U.S. Civil War is rich and deep, but much of it remains regionally specific or subsumed in more general treatments of Northern and Southern peoples during the war.