Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online

Until now, history researchers have had access to two main kinds of electronic resources. On the one hand are the newspapers, reporting condensed, third-person descriptions of selected events as they occur. On the other hand are the reference and journal databases, whose articles present retrospective interpretations.

Alexander Street’s social and cultural history projects offer something entirely new and critically important—personal, contemporaneous, and first-person accounts, history as experienced by the individuals who lived through and created it. These are primary documents in the truest sense. Previously unheard voices of ordinary people, regional and diverse, fill the collections alongside those of famous figures.

Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online

Imagine seeing into the minds of tens of thousands of individuals and knowing the details of their lives within seconds. Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online allows today’s readers to feel and understand what it was like to be a person of any time, race, ethnicity, or gender, experiencing the past viscerally—through personal and private writings presented as searchable full-text documents, audio files, images, and online videos. The most comprehensive archive of social memory yet created, Letters and Diaries Online is the ideal starting point for historians, sociologists, genealogists, linguists, and psychologists who want to explore and analyze human experiences.

Heard together at last

The first-person narratives of people from diverse groups, famous and ordinary, and from all walks of life, can at last be heard together, in writings that are frank, detailed, and personal. In their own words, 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. There are contemporaneous letters, diaries, interviews, and speeches by women from around the world discussing life events ranging from childbirth to death of a child, political figures describing how they became activists, American Civil War soldiers writing from the battlefields and from hospitals, and immigrants describing ship passages and first impressions of America.

Brought together under a new, unified search interface are all the letters, diaries, and personal narratives in various Alexander Street individual collections (including North American Women's Letters and Diaries, British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries, The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries, Oral History Online, and others) as well as content from a wide range of other sources. Much of the material is in-copyright, rare, ephemeral, and available nowhere else, including all the interviews from the Ellis Island Oral History Research Center, exclusive Black Panther oral histories in full-text and audio, and many previously unseen letters and diaries. A vast index to oral histories from archives and repositories around the world links to full text, audio, and video whenever available. At least 550,000 pages are from Alexander Street’s proprietary databases, with hundreds of thousands of additional narratives drawn from other online sources everywhere. There will be 15,000 new pages added exclusively to Letters and Diaries Online annually, appearing in no other Alexander Street collections.

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

• Find letters written by children to their fathers during the American Civil War.
   

• Find passages written by immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island on the topic of becoming a citizen. How do they compare to passages written by immigrants who arrived through West Coast locations?
   

• Do diary entries written by women in the eighteenth century describe childbirth?
   

• How do diary passages written by women on the subject of love to men differ from letters they wrote to other women?
   

• Find oral histories by black narrators on the subject of polio.
   

• Play audio files of World War II veterans born in Ohio discussing bombing missions.
   

• Show videos of jazz musicians of the twentieth century.

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 gathered by David Hilliard, former chief of staff and now an educator in Oakland, California—also exclusively through Alexander Street, along with full-page color images;
   

• Letters and diaries from London’s Imperial War Museum, written by women who served in both world wars, exclusively online 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 from thousands of archives around the world that are free on the Web but virtually un-findable without the Letters and Diaries Online unified search index.

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 titles in our Social and Cultural History series, including The Sixties; Twentieth Century Advice Literature: North American Guides on Race, Gender, Sex, and the Family; The Gilded Age; and The American Civil War Online.