Digital Durham: Life and Labor in the New South

Learn more

• Learn more about African Americans, Durham, Durham County, history, maps, North Carolina, and primary sources.

Legal

The Digital Durham website from Duke University offers students, teachers, and researchers a range of primary sources which they can use to investigate the economic, social, cultural and political history of a post-bellum southern community from the 1870s to the 1920s.

Visitors to the site can browse the entire collection which has been classified by the type of resource. For instance, there are personal papers, business, records, maps, photographs, printed works, personal papers, and public records. There are also audio clips to hear. Each section has a drop-down menu where you may choose to browse by date, title, or creator. The Public Records section has information on the residents of Durham from the 1880 federal population census of Durham Township. Searches may be done by Soundex, a simple search by name, or a more advanced search. Information that can be found includes migration, mortality, life expectancy, experience of labor, segregation, and education. There are many ways that these materials can be used. For example, students can cross reference the materials by looking at business records and then searching the census for information on a particular business owner.

Audio Postcards have been created by Duke University students. The students used their I-Pods to capture the essence of Durham’s past. Hear an interview of a Durham resident as she talks about “the experience of African American women in post-Civil War Durham and the New South” or listen to a student as he takes a walk through the American Tobacco Campus and relates the history of Durham’s tobacco industry. Another student studied African American Visual Culture and talks about rare advertising material that she found in Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

The Teachers Corner has lesson plans with related documents. These can be downloaded via a PDF file or Microsoft Word document. Most of the documents are in PDF format.