"First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. The narratives available in this collection offer personal accounts of Southern life between 1860 and 1920, a period of enormous change. At the end of the Civil War, the South faced the enormous challenge of re-creating their society after their land had been ravaged by war, many of their men were dead or injured, and the economic and social system of slavery had been abolished. Many farmers, confronted by periodic depressions and market turmoil, joined political and social protest movements. For African Americans, the end of slavery brought hope for unprecedented control of their own lives, but whether they stayed in the South or moved north or west, they continued to face social and political oppression. Most African Americans in the South were pulled into a Darwinistic sharecropper system and saw their lives circumscribed by the rise of segregation. As conservative views faced a growing challenge from Modernist thought, Southern arts, sciences, and religion also reflected the considerable tensions manifested throughout Southern society. Admidst these dramatic changes, Southerners who had lived in the antebellum South and soldiers who had fought for the Confederacy wrote memoirs that and strived to preserve a memory of many different experiences. Southerners recorded their stories of these tumultuous times in print and in diaries and letters, but few first-person narratives, other than those written by the social and economic elite found their way into the national print culture. In this online collection, accounts of life on the farm or in the servants' quarters or in the cotton mill have priority over accounts of public lives and leading military battles. Each narrative offers a unique perspective on life in the South, and serves as an important primary resource for the study of the American South. The original texts for "First-Person Narratives of the American South" come from the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which includes the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country and the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere. The DocSouth Editorial Board, composed of faculty and librarians at UNC and staff from the UNC Press, oversees this collection and all other collections on Documenting the American South. Context The North American Slave Narratives collection at the University of North Carolina contains 344 items and is the most extensive collection of such documents in the world. The physical collection was digitized and transcribed by students and library employees. This means that the text is far more reliable than uncorrected OCR output which is common in digitized archives. More information about the collection and access to individual page images can be be found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh The plain text files have been optimized for use in Voyant and can also be used in text mining projects such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Please note that the full text contains paratextual elements such as title pages and appendices which will be included in any word counts you perform. You may wish to delete these in order to focus your analysis on just the narratives. The .csv file acts as a table of contents for the collection and includes Title, Author, Publication Date a url pointing to the digitized version of the text and a unique url pointing to a version of the text in plain text (this is particularly useful for use with Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/). Copyright Statement and Acknowledgements With the exception of "Fields's Observation: The Slave Narrative of a Nineteenth-Century Virginian," which has no known rights, the texts, encoding, and metadata available in Open DocSouth are made available for use under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Users are free to copy, share, adapt, and re-publish any of the content in Open DocSouth as long as they credit the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for making this material available. If you make use of this data, considering letting the holder of the original collection know how you are using the data and if you have any suggestions for making it even more useful. Send any feedback to wilsonlibrary@unc.edu. About the DocSouth Data Project Doc South Data provides access to some of the Documenting The American South collections in formats that work well with common text mining and data analysis tools. Documenting the American South is one of the longest running digital publishing initiatives at the University of North Carolina. It was designed to give researchers digital access to some of the library’s unique collections in the form of high quality page scans as well as structured, corrected and machine readable text. Doc South Data is an extension of this original goal and has been designed for researchers who want to use emerging technology to look for patterns across entire texts or compare patterns found in multiple texts. We have made it easy to use tools such as Voyant (http://voyant-tools.org/) to conduct simple word counts and frequency visualizations (such as word clouds) or to use other tools to perform more complex processes such as topic modeling, named-entity recognition or sentiment analysis.