The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History & Diplomacy

Courtesy of the Lillian Goldman Law Library: Yale Law School

Statement of Purpose and Document Inclusion Policy

"The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. We do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.

The Avalon Project will no doubt contain controversial documents. Their inclusion does not indicate endorsement of their contents nor sympathy with the ideology, doctrines, or means employed by their authors. They are included for the sake of completeness and balance and because in many cases they are by our definition a supporting document."

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/major.asp 

America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War

URL: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/index.html

"This exhibit examines one of the most turbulent and controversial eras in American history. It presents an up-to-date portrait of a period whose unrealized goals of economic and racial justice still confront our society.

...

Reconstruction, one of the most turbulent and controversial eras in American history, began during the Civil War and ended in 1877. It witnessed America's first experiment in interracial democracy. Just as the fate of slavery was central to the meaning of the Civil War, so the divisive politics of Reconstruction turned on the status the former slaves would assume in the reunited nation. Reconstruction remains relevant today because the issues central to it -- the role of the federal government in protecting citizens' rights, and the possibility of economic and racial justice -- are still unresolved."

Freedmen and Southern Society Project

URL: http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/index.html

"The Freedmen and Southern Society Project was established in 1976 to capture the essence of that revolution by depicting the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners. ... Drawing upon the rich resources of the National Archives of the United States, the project's editors pored over millions of documents, selecting some 50,000. They are presently transcribing, organizing, and annotating them to explain how black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction in 1867. The documents vividly speak for themselves, and interpretive essays by the editors provide historical context."

Northern Visions of Race, Region, & Reform

URL: http://mac110.assumption.edu/aas/default.html

"NORTHERN VISIONS OF RACE, REGION, & REFORM is an online resource documenting conflicting representations of African-Americans, white Southerners, and reformers during and and immediately after the Civil War. In particular, it looks at the stereotypes popularized in the northern press, and the ways that these depictions were countered--or in some cases, reinforced--in the letters written for northern readers by freedmen's teachers and freedmen themselves"