Congressman Benjamin Turner of Alabama, ca. 1875

The Alabama History Portal is a free teaching resource created by W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama. Here, Alabama's teachers can find resources including interactive history timelines, subject-oriented bibliographies, lesson plans, and primary source galleries.

The primary source collections consist of newspaper articles curated from UA's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). A collaboration with the Library of Congress (LOC) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Alabama's historical newspapers are digitized and made freely available via the Chronicling America online collection.

The selected articles in the primary source galleries highlight key events in Alabama's development as well as articles that detail important themes throughout the state's history. The articles are useful for reading assignments, class discussion, or to be incorporated into lectures as illustrative examples. These include newspaper articles that convey dominant social attitudes about race, gender, Alabama's working class, the institution of slavery, and segregation. Each primary source item contains an image of the original article, a typed version of its text, and a brief summary placing it in its historical context.

Credits

Newspaper content is digitally clipped or transcribed from the originals at Chronicling America. These images were digitized for the NDNP grant program by the University of Alabama Libraries’ Special Collections. The timelines were generated using the open-source tool TimelineJS from Knight Lab, with images sourced from Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress.

This website was created and curated by Dr. David Ferrara, Belle Johnston, and Bailey Tillman in July 2023.