Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online

Brought together under a unified search interface is all the premium content from the following Alexander Street individual collections:

-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

Combined, the materials in this vast collection offer something entirely new and critically important for history research—personal, contemporaneous, first-person accounts—history as experienced by the individuals who lived through and created it. The voices of ordinary people, unheard until now, live alongside those of famous figures. These are primary documents in the truest sense.

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 Social and Cultural History: Letters and Diaries Online from anywhere with a valid APSU ID.