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The Making of America: Nineteenth-Century Texts
From: University of Michigan
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 ith the advent of digital technologies, thousands of primary source documents--the backbone of historical research--have been electronically preserved by archivists and librarians. Many nineteenth-century books, articles, journals and newspapers are printed on paper that is now very brittle. As a result, this record of America's social, cultural and intellectual past may not otherwise last through the twenty-first century for public usage. Now, with websites like Making of America (http://moa.umdl.umich.edu//
index.html), students, scholars and historians have continued and greater access to America's heritage. |
Making of America is a digital library of primary sources of American social history from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. The website presents the full texts of approximately 2,800 books and 50,000 journal articles with nineteenth-century imprints. Articles such as "The Romance and Religion of Billiards" (Vanity Fair, 1860), "The Duty of the Church in Relation to Sunday Schools" (Princeton Review, 1832) and "The Veterans of Yesterday"
(Appletons' Journal, 1881) and books such as Anti-slavery Poems of John Pierpont (1843) illuminate nineteenth-century attitudes and thought on education, psychology, literature, history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. |
The site is an ideal resource for researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century America. The database, with fully searchable text, displays images of each page of the journals and books. This allows users to view the works as originally published and browse through the words of 100 years ago. Although simplified text versions are available to download, the site provides several caveats for the quality and accuracy for the text-only versions. Making of America is an ongoing project of the University of Michigan Library. Plans to add 7,500 more volumes to the database are under way and should be completed in January 2001. |
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