• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
• Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries (from the American Antiquarian Society)
• British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
• Black Thought and Culture
• Oral History Online

As Alexander Street editors identify new letters and diaries, Letters and Diaries Online will continue to grow.

The project also links to, indexes, and makes cross searchable more than 700,000 full-text pages of oral histories from open-access Web resources around the world, hand-selected by Alexander Street editors for their value to researchers.

Using The Alexander Street Conductor™ technology, Letters and Diaries Online lets users search across all of this content—from each of the Alexander Street individual collections, all of the new letters and diaries as they are added, and the best oral history content available on the Web as identified by Alexander Street editors—using a single search interface. The Conductor™ orchestrates the search results into one unified results set.

Examples of Rare and Otherwise Inaccessible Content

• The Ellis Island Oral History Project’s 35,000 pages of interviews, including audio links, published for the first time and available exclusively through Alexander Street;
• More than 2,000 Black Panther oral histories, available nowhere else;
• Letters and diaries from London’s Imperial War Museum, written by women who served in both world wars, online exclusively from Alexander Street;
• An Alexander Street-commissioned translation from Yiddish of the diary of a teenage boy who arrived in Philadelphia from Lithuania in the early nineteenth century, describing his personal coming of age and five years of his observations of American culture during the Roaring Twenties;
• Access to the oral histories that are free on the Web but impossible to search efficiently without the Letters and Diaries Online unified search index.

Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™ makes everything searchable together, including the free Web resources, for a consolidated search result. Searches like these are easy from a single screen:

• Find letters written by men fighting during the American Civil War, written in camp and sent home to their families.
• How do teachers in the South describe the influence of the U.S. Civil Rights movement on their students?
• How do letters written by women in the eighteenth century describe childbirth?
• How do letters about love written by women to other women differ from letters about love written by women to men?
• Find oral histories by black doctors and nurses on the subject of polio.
• Find interviews of World War II veterans born in Ohio discussing bombing missions.
• Show personal narratives of jazz musicians of the twentieth century.

Heard Together for the First Time

The voices of people from diverse groups, famous and ordinary, can at last be heard together. People across time and place tell us about their lives, loves, careers, challenges, accomplishments, spiritual paths, identity struggles, political activities, and countless other life events. Women from around the world discuss life events ranging from childbirth to death of a child. Political figures describe how they became activists. Soldiers write from battlefields, prisons, and hospital deathbeds. Immigrants describe ship passages and first impressions of America. Virtually every subject is addressed, and the words are frank, detailed, and personal.

Publication Details

Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online is available on the Web through annual subscription, with prices scaled to materials budget. Libraries that have purchased perpetual rights to one or more of the Alexander Street collections of letters and diaries will pay reduced subscription rates.

Contact sales@alexanderstreet.com or your sales representative for information about other Alexander Street history titles, including The Sixties; Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family; The Gilded Age; Images of the American Civil War: Photographs, Posters, and Ephemera; The American Civil War Research Database™; The American Civil War Online; and others.

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