THE SOUTH ATLANTIC MARITIME WORLD, and the broader Atlantic world, involved Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans. A remarkable work of memoir bringing this world alive – one of the very first in the slave narrative genre whose most famous later exponent was Frederick Douglass – is Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. The full texts of Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the 1789 edition are available through UNC Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South site. For an outstanding compendium of critical resources on Equiano's text, life, and times, including a map of his many voyages, see the Equiano Web site created by Brycchan Carey, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University in Surrey UK.

CROSSROADS AND BATTLEGROUND OF EMPIRES – this has been the South Atlantic's historic lot too. Part One of The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza De Vaca (1542; Fanny Bandelier's 1905 translation) records the Spanish conquistador's path from Florida to Louisiana; the site links to the rest of the text. An electronic version from of Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales's 16th century text documents the Founding of St. Augustine; another translated Spanish text on early Florida is El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's "History of the Conquest of Florida" (both texts are from the Early Americas Digital Archive).

INDENTURED SERVANTS were an important group of men, women, and children in the early South Atlantic world. A scintillating document in verse form, James Revel's The Poor, Unhappy Transported Felon's Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America, is available through the VCDH's Geography of Slavery site. You can search the registers of ships transporting indentured servants from Britain to foreign plantations, 1654-1686 (part of Virtual Jamestown). Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders contains many incidents involving "transportation" to Virginia.

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM have found themselves at the defining heart of South Atlantic history for over five centuries. Numerous narrative of ex-slaves were gathered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writer's Project in the late 1930s; the American Studies Department of the University of Virginia has an Online Anthology of American Slave Narratives, with the text transcripts of some two dozen interviews, photographs of some of the men and women interviewed, and in some cases sound recordings of their voices (for instance that of Charlottesville, Virginia native Fountain Hughes). The Library of Congress's American Memory site has a superb online collection, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project 1936-1938 , containing texts, photographs, sound, and explanatory material.

THE PLANTATION was a, perhaps the, defining institution – economic, of course, but also social, cultural, and political, as well as deeply intertwined with family history – of the US South for more than two centuries. Its origins lie specifically in the South Atlantic region, beginning in the Caribbean and then extending to Virginia, South Carolina, and other parts of the mainland. A detailed prospectus for a treasure-trove of primary documents available in microform can be found in historian Kenneth M. Stampp's archival guide entitled Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War.

COLONIAL HISTORY is testified to in a great many texts. William Berkeley, the influential 17th-century governor of Virginia, left us A Discourse and View of Virginia, provided in electronic text by the Early Americas Digital Archive, where we also find "Francis Yeardley's Narrative of Excursions into Carolina, 1654."

THE WPA WRITER'S PROJECT AND THE SOUTH ATLANTIC is a fascinating intersection, providing insights into our region as it was in the wrenching, but creative, time of transition that was the 1930s. Web users can find the WPA Guide to the Old Dominion of Virginia (courtesy of American Studies Department of the University of Virginia) and, from the Library of Congress's American Memory site, WPA Life Histories from the following states: North Carolina; Georgia; Florida, and South Carolina.

FOLKLIFE OF THE SOUTH ATLANTIC amounts to a vast panorama of peoples, times, and places. Zora Neale Hurston's literary treatment of African American folk themes, long neglected, has become essential reading; the American Studies Department of the University of Virginia provides an electronic text of her seminal work, Mules and Men.

THE NATURAL AND HUMAN ENVIRONMENT of the South Atlantic inspired the passionate, loving, and painstaking attention of traveler, naturalist, and writer William Bartram (1789-1823), whose father John is considered by some to have been North America's first botanist. Thanks to UNC Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South site, we have access to an electronic edition of Bartram's Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians (Philadelphia, 1791). See New Georgia Encyclopedia article on Bartram.