On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

Here's an excellent site for reference material on Southern Literature and History.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/index.html

From the website:

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.
The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings. The UNC University Library is committed to the long-term availability of these collections and their online records. An editorial board guides development of this digital library.

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs.

The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors Documenting the American South, and the texts and materials come primarily from its southern holdings. The UNC University Library is committed to the long-term availability of these collections and their online records. An editorial board guides development of this digital library."

Here's one I read recently for some genealogy I was working on. It won't be for everyone, but if you like local histories, you might be interested. It's about the French in Mobile, so it does actually have some vague relevance to the current book we're reading. :^)

http://books.google.com/books/about/C...

Jessie

Thanks Mike! I'd been looking for this kind of material for some research I'm doing. Out west (where I live now) the Southern literary and historic material seems to stop around the Civil War.

I meant to post this when we were reading Absalom, Absalom, but temporarily forgot about this thread.

An early Indian battle (spurred by the French and English) took place relatively near Lee County, MS, in 1736, around Cotton Gin Port.

http://www.mississippigenealogy.com/h...

This battle was brought to mind because I read somewhere while I was reading Absalom Absalom about how "unsettled" Mississippi was until right before the Civil War. Well, that's true, in a way. It was unsettled by white planters until that time.

There's a wonderful place online where a lot of the French documentation about colonial North America has been translated into English (which means I don't have to beg my friend Amita in Paris to translate 18th century French for me anymore!). Here's D'Artaguiette's account:

http://gbl.indiana.edu/ethnohistory/a...

http://gbl.indiana.edu/ethnohistory/a...

Here's Bienville's account:

http://gbl.indiana.edu/ethnohistory/a...

And I couldn't find it here in my quick scan of the documents, but D'Artaguiette also brought up a large number of African slaves to be used as "cannon fodder" for the battle. When they got wind of which way the battle was headed, they escaped into the wilds of North Mississippi, presumably to either scrape together a living or (more probably) to be enslaved by the Chickasaw.