Electronic Resources

In the First Person

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 volumesÂ?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 databasesÂ?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.

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