Daily Archives: April 29, 2010

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries

“My pen is always freer than my tongue. I have written many things to you that I suppose I never could have talked.” — Abigail Adams, 1775

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries is the largest collection of women’s diaries and correspondence ever assembled. Spanning more than 300 years, brings the personal experiences of some 1,325 women to researchers, students, and general readers.

The uses for the collection will be many and varied. For historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy, and others, North American Women’s Letters and Diaries will prove a dramatic new resource. These diaries bring us much more than the personal. They provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves. We can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. We can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends. William Matthews, an early scholar in this field, observed:

“I believe the diary to be a unique kind of writing; all other forms of writing envisage readers, and so are adapted to readers, by interpretation, order, simplification, rationalization, omission, addition, and the endless devices of exposition . . . [diaries] are in general the most immediate, truthful, and revealing documents available. . .”

The collection includes some 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from Colonial times to 1950, including more than 6,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 600 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous. It includes some 300 biographies to enhance the use of the database.North American Women’s Letters and Diaries aims to cover all published material and as large a number of unpublished materials as copyright and cost will allow. The contents have been selected from the bibliographies listed below as well as other sources.

~Alexander Street Press

North American Women’s Letters and Diaries is a new database available from WKU Libraries. This database adds enormous material to the WKU Libraries sources for women’s studies, history, and related fields. The database can be accessed from on campus or from off campus, once you log into our proxy server.

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The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries

WKU Libraries is happy to announce the acquisition of a new online database: The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries. This resource contains material from over two thousand authors with 100,000 pages of letters, memoirs, and diaries. Many of the sources have not been published anywhere else.

The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries knits together more than 1,000 sources of diaries, letters, and memoirs to provide fast access to thousands of views on almost every aspect of the war, including what was happening at home. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, farmers, seaman, wives, and even spies are included. The letters and diaries are by the famous and the unknown, giving not only both the Northern and Southern perspectives, but those of foreign observers also. The materials originate from all regions of the country and are from people who played a variety of roles.

Using a thesaurus of Civil War terms we’ve built specifically for the task, researchers can quickly find references to individuals, battles, theaters of war, and activities. A chronology of key events allows the user to see multiple perspectives surrounding a particular event. This level of indexing is unprecedented. Questions such as “Give me all accounts of letters written about hospital conditions by Union soldiers in the Western Theater” can be answered in seconds.

The collection includes approximately 100,000 pages of published memoirs, letters and diaries from individuals plus 4,000 pages of previously unpublished materials. Drawn from more than 1,000 sources, the collection provides in-depth coverage of all aspects of the war. More than 1,000 biographies will enhance the use of the database.

The collection includes one of the most comprehensive bibliographies of Civil War letters and diaries yet published. It lists over 1,000 published and unpublished items from a variety of sources, including online resources and microform. Subscribers to the collection are encouraged to participate in the maintenance of this bibliography by calling our attention to omissions, suggesting additions, and notifying us of newly discovered materials.

~Alexander Street Press

To access the resource from on campus, click here. From off campus, you can log into our proxy server and access the resource on our database page.

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