|
The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries knits
together more than 400 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs, to
provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the
war. This extraordinary electronic collection includes 100,000 pages of
re-keyed and indexed text, including 4,000 facsimile pages of previously
unpublished manuscript material.
Scholars can read close to 200 intimate letters written by Amos Wood,
his wife Clara, and their three-year-old son, Freddie, illustrating what
life was like for a Massachusetts family separated by the war. Users can
see and compare, for the first time, the writings of politicians,
generals, slaves, landowners, seamen, and spies. The letters and diaries
are by the famous and the unknown, giving both the Northern and the
Southern perspectives, along with that of foreign observers.
Ways to use the
database:
-
Table of
Contents--
Use these to see what's contained in the database. This is the best
way to check whether an author or a source is included. To use this
tool, simply click on the appropriate table of contents button on
the navigation bar.
-
Find Tools
-- The "FIND" tools let you search for specific authors and sources
that the database contains and combine criteria to narrow down what
you're looking for. The difference between the "FIND" tools and the
"SEARCH" tools (explained next) is in the results they give. The
"FIND" tools do not return documents, but rather lists of authors
and sources in the database.
-
Search Tools
-- The "SEARCH" tools let you analyze words and documents that occur
within the text of stories that meet your search criteria. The
"SEARCH" tools return stories or bibliographic citations or both.
Boolean
Operators in Full-Text Searching:
-
The vertical
line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., avarice|greed or holy
ghost|spirit).
-
Space: serves
as the AND operator in sentence and paragraph Proximity Searching
(e.g., church state retrieve all cases where church and state appear
in the same specified context; this is not the case in phrase
searching).
-
These
expressions can be combined for more sophisticated searches; for
example, searching
old|aged|ancient m.n|fellow*
finds any of the three adjectives together with the nouns man or
fellow in the singular or plural.
Wildcard
Characters in Full-Text Searching:
. (period):
matches any
single character (e.g., gentlem.n will retrieve gentleman and
gentlemen).
* (asterisk):
matches any
string of characters, anchoring the match at the beginning of a word
(e.g., cigar* will match cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.).
* (asterisk):
matches any
string of characters, anchoring the match at the end of a word (e.g.,
*habit will retrieve habit, cohabit, and inhabit), or in the middle
(e.g., c.*eers matches compeers, cheers, and careers).
.? (period
question mark):
matches the
characters entered or the characters entered plus one more character in
place of the question mark (e.g., hono.?r matches both honor and honour
and cat.? matches cat and cats, but not cathedral, Catherine, etc.).
[a-z] (brackets):
matches a
single character found in the specified range (e.g., [c-f]at will match
cat, dat, eat, and fat) or any letters within the brackets (e.g.,
civili[zs]e will match both civilize and civilise).
# (hash mark):
matches
capitalized words only (e.g., #bacon will retrieve Bacon, but not
bacon). Otherwise word searches are case insensitive. Please note that
this operator does not work properly in conjunction with the vertical
bar (e.g., searching #hamlet|#bacon will not retrieve accurate results).
E (capital
letter):
matches all
accented and non-accented forms (e.g., to search naïveté regardless of
accents type naIvetE).
You may access The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries from anywhere
with a valid APSU ID.
|
