Alexander Street Press News and Updates

The American Civil War Research Database™ is live

I am excited to announce the release of Alexander Street's latest history database - The American Civil War Research Database™.  Free trials are now available for your institution.

The American Civil War Research Database™ is the definitive online resource for researching the soldiers, regiments, and battles of the American Civil War. Originally created by Historical Data Systems, Inc., the database contains indexed, searchable information on over 4 million soldiers and thousands of battles, together with 15,000 photographs. With thousands of regimental rosters and officer profiles, the database will continue to grow as new information is loaded bi-annually.

In addition to 222 volumes of rosters published by the state Adjutants Generals, the database includes the military records for every soldier in the collection as well as Official Records, pension index records, 1860 census records, Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) records, Roll of Honor records, Medal of Honor records, and regimental histories. This information has been compiled from personal items, graveyards, and newspaper reports.

Database users can examine the military record for each soldier, or even search the entire research collection by soldier, regiment, state, and battle. The database also allows users to trace the war effort using critical statistics including average age, method of entry into and exit from the military, war engagements, and associated loss and prisoner statistics. Researchers can go below the big picture to analyze the details of specific regiments where they saw combat, their casualty statistics, and the effects of disease. They can also use census information to decipher the impact on a particular soldier's hometown.

Analytical tools are a distinctive feature of The American Civil War Research Database™, letting you identify a large-scale trend and then focus down to the regiment or individual soldier. Dozens of charts and graphs give an immediate visual understanding of complex data. Users of the database can see, for example, a chart analyzing death by disease and then explore the Regimental Casualty Analysis and the Regimental Assignment charts for clues to the reasons.

Request a free trial or contact us for more information on this and other Civil War databases from Alexander Street Press.

 

The Gilded Age goes live

After much anticipation The Gilded Age is now live!  The first release contains 23,000 pages of fully searchable text and dozens of secondary material including critical documentary essays, video interviews, and audio recordings. These materials are frequently rare and hard-to-find, and include songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. Also, check out the Browse Chronology section to see the interactive time line of the period.

Spanning from 1865 to 1902, The Gilded Age provides insight into the key issues that shaped America in the late nineteenth century, including race and ethnicity, immigration, labor, women's rights, American Indians, political corruption, and monetary policy. Regular updates of The Gilded Age collection ensure an ever-expanding wealth of fully searchable resources. Essential primary materials have been gathered from a large number of libraries, museums, and archives, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Illinois State Library. Researchers will find especially useful an extensive bibliography, developed especially for and exclusive to this collection, and video interviews of leading historians such as Maureen Flanagan (Michigan State University), Michael Kazin (Georgetown University), and James Gilbert (University of Maryland).

To supplement the primary material and to facilitate the teaching of research using primary sources at the university level, the database also includes a collection of critical documentary essays. Compiled by leading scholars in the field and assembled around a major theme or research question, each critical documentary essay consists of twenty to thirty annotated primary-source documents, linked together by an original interpretive essay that provides historical context and insight into the sources. Among the scholars who have created critical documentary essays for The Gilded Age are Samuel Thomas of Michigan State University, Christopher Reed of Roosevelt University, Kim Warren of the University of Kansas, and Daniel Thorp of Virginia Tech. The result of their efforts is a highly visual, annotated record
of this critical period in American history.

Request a free trial or contact us for more information on this and other Alexander Street resources.

routine maintenance scheduled for Thursday, Jan 17

Please be advised that on January 17, 2008 we will conduct some routine maintenance on our servers from 9:00 PM until 3:00 AM EST.  Interruptions to our systems should be minimal but some brief periods of downtime are possible.   

If you have any questions about the maintenance or the schedule, please contact customer support at support@alexanderstreet.com or call at 703-212-8502 ext: 127.

 

Romantic Era Redefined

Alexander Street Press today announces a strategic alliance with London-based Pickering & Chatto Publishers that will provide academic research libraries worldwide with The Romantic Era Redefined, a new, genre-redefining electronic collection of Romantic-era literature and critical essays.

The Romantic Era Redefined will make available in electronic form 200,000 pages of poetry, prose, drama, letters, diaries, travel narratives, and political and philosophical works by canonical and previously unrecognized Romantic-era writers. Fifty percent of the collection will be sourced from Pickering & Chatto’s existing inventory of carefully edited and annotated Romantic-era critical editions that will be digitized especially for the project. In addition, the collection will include 50 critical essays written by leading scholars that will help to contextualize the primary source material for the benefit of students, faculty and researchers working in multiple disciplines. The collection is expected to be released to Alexander Street Press customers through subscription or purchase beginning in the second half of 2008.