The online collection is growing to include 5,000 individual volumes, with 650,000 pages and more than a million images. Each book tells a small piece of American history. But when researched together with Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing, the collection becomes a massive and powerful primary-source research tool, a tapestry of the places and people that have made America.
For Scholarship, Study, and Personal Research
For academic scholarship, the collection will have broad departmental relevance, showing the personal stories and photos of immigrants, laborers, and newsmakers; documenting the local architecture of homes and businesses; showing images of racism and tolerance; delivering history as observed in real time. The photos are from historical societies, archives, and private collections. The texts are written by local historians—people with deep and personal knowledge of their communities. In many instances, the authors are protagonists in the historical events they describe, with family photographs, primary documents, and other materials that are inaccessible outside of these publications.
Examples of academic disciplines served include:
Sports history, recreation—Major leagues, local teams, and their influences on communities: Metro Detroit Boxing; Gold in the Ozarks; Central Park Zoo; New York City Vaudeville; New York Giants; Hockey in Providence
Architecture and urban studies—How spaces were used in the past: Lost Ann Arbor; Cemeteries Around Lake Winnipesaukee; Railroad Depots of West Central Ohio
Race and gender—Italians in Detroit; Jewish Community of North Minneapolis; The Chinese Community of Stockton; An Oral History of Tahlequah and The Cherokee Nation
Labor and organizational history—Army, Coast Guard, canal workers, nurses, police departments, fire departments, unions, factory conditions: Firefighting in Frederick; Fairchild Aircraft; The Long Island Railroad; Straub Brewery; WNAX 570 Radio
War—New Hampshire in the Civil War; Cincinnati: The World War II years
Religion—The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh
New Tools for Search and Discovery
Alexander Street has indexed the books using a new thesaurus created specifically for this collection. Places, people, dates, events, architectural features, and ethnicities are some of the index terms, making searches such as these easy:
Find African American schools in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Find pictures of coal miners in Kentucky and Virginia from 1900 to 1950.
Find examples of neocolonial architecture in the Northeast and Southwest.
Find pictures and descriptions of college football games in Nebraska in the 1950s.
Find depictions of the Irish American community in Youngstown, Ohio. In all of the Midwest. Compared to the Italian-American communities in these areas.
Find Jewish butchers in Chicago in the 1920s.
On-Campus Link
The online collection is growing to include 5,000 individual volumes, with 650,000 pages and more than a million images. Each book tells a small piece of American history. But when researched together with Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing, the collection becomes a massive and powerful primary-source research tool, a tapestry of the places and people that have made America.
