| In the First Person
is a landmark index to English language personal
narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs,
autobiographies, and oral histories. Working with
archives, repositories, publishers, and individuals
we've indexed first person narratives from hundreds of
published volumes—those that are publicly available on
the Web and those that are held by repositories and
archives around the world. Our intent is to make it
possible to find and explore the voices of more than
300,000 individuals.
Future updates will contain
full-text sources and hundreds of thousands of
bibliographic records. The index will allow users
perform in-depth field and keyword searches across all
letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, and
autobiographies within Alexander Street Press
databases—more than one million pages of editorially
selected materials spanning 400 years. The index also
applies the same extensive search tools to scholarly
materials that are freely available on the Web. With a
single search, users can perform keyword searches across
thousands of personal narratives from the
English-speaking world.
The most comprehensive
archive of social memory yet created, In the First
Person is a one-stop starting point for historians,
sociologists, genealogists, linguists, and psychologists
who want to find, explore, and analyze human
experiences. The stories of diverse groups and ordinary
people from all walks of life can at last be heard
alongside those of the well-published and famous. And,
the public voices we hear in print and in the media
reveal the more honest and personal accounts of their
lives.
In the First Person
is updated on a quarterly schedule. |
