Students and scholars can see how frequently they attended church, how they viewed their connection to God, and how they prayed. They can explore their relationships with lovers and family and friends. The writings of politicians, generals, slaves, landowners, seamen, wives, and spies are included. The letters and diaries give both the Northern and the Southern perspectives, as well as the views of foreign observers. Detailed firsthand descriptions of historical characters and events, glimpses of daily life in the army, anecdotes about key events and personages, and accounts of sufferings at home, written for private consumption, provide an immediacy and a richness that are unmatched in public sources.
Users can ask questions never before possible.
Queries will quickly produce sets of search results that would have taken years, or been impossible, without the databases themselves. Its aim is to build shared digital collections and innovative scholarly information services for the institutions in the University of California system. They include existing UC campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, and also UC Merced, which is scheduled to open in 2004. Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is an academic publisher of electronic full-text databases in the humanities and social sciences. The company, launched in July 2000 by executives of the former Chadwyck-Healey company, is currently developing databases in history, women s studies, sociology, popular culture, film studies, the arts, and more.