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Local and Regional History Online
Alexander Street Press and Arcadia Publishing,
whose award-winning history books cover thousands of towns and cultural
groups in all fifty states, have partnered to create Local and
Regional History Online: A History of American Life in Images and Texts.
The online collection is growing to include 5,000 individual volumes,
with 650,000 pages and more than a million images. Each book alone tells a
small piece of American history. But when searched together through
Alexander Street's Semantic Indexing™, the collection becomes a
massive and powerful primary-source research tool, a tapestry of the
places and people that have made America. Libraries are filled with
history books about “great men.” Here is history through the stories and
images of everyman and everywoman, giving readers a balanced
understanding of history through place and time.
For Scholarship, Study,
and Personal Research
Local and Regional History Online is an essential tool for
genealogical research, broadly supplementing raw facts with actual
images of the towns, factories, schools, churches, and people that
shaped a family’s history. Public libraries will serve their
communities in the most exciting way, offering 5,000 Arcadia titles (for
less than a dollar a book) that give patrons highly visual, curbside
views of their neighborhoods over time. What did the schools look like
fifty years ago? Where were the buildings and churches? How did the
community change during the World Wars? The marriage of images and texts will jog
personal memories and communicate the emotions associated with
homecomings, funerals, and other events of previous generations.
For academic scholarship, the collection will have broad departmental
relevance, showing the personal stories and photos of immigrants,
laborers, and newsmakers; documenting the local architecture of homes
and businesses; showing images of racism and tolerance; delivering
history as observed in real time. The photos are from historical
societies, archives, and private collections. The texts are written by
local historians—people with deep and personal knowledge of their
communities. In many instances, the authors are protagonists in the
historical events they describe, with family photographs, primary
documents, and other materials that are inaccessible outside of these
publications.
Examples of academic disciplines served include:
- Sports history, recreation—major leagues,
local teams, and their influences on communities (Metro Detroit
Boxing; Gold in the Ozarks; Central Park Zoo; New York City
Vaudeville; New York Giants; Hockey in Providence)
- Architecture and urban studies—how spaces
were used in the past (Lost Ann Arbor; Cemeteries Around Lake
Winnipesaukee; Railroad Depots of West Central Ohio)
- Race and gender (Italians in Detroit;
Jewish Community of North Minneapolis; The Chinese Community of
Stockton; An Oral History of Tahlequah and The Cherokee Nation)
- Labor and organizational history—Army,
Coast Guard, canal workers, nurses, police departments, fire
departments, unions, factory conditions (Firefighting in Frederick;
Fairchild Aircraft; The Long Island Railroad; Straub Brewery; WNAX
570 Radio)
- War (New Hampshire in the Civil War;
Cincinnati: The World War II Years)
- Religion (The Roman Catholic Diocese of
Pittsburgh)
New Tools for Search
and Discovery
Alexander Street has indexed the books using a new thesaurus created
specifically for this collection. Places, people, dates, events,
architectural features, and ethnicities are some of the index terms,
making searches such as these easy:
- Find African American schools in DeKalb
County, Georgia.
- Find pictures of coal miners in Kentucky
and Virginia from 1900 to 1950.
- Find examples of neocolonial architecture
in the Northeast and Southwest.
- Find pictures and descriptions of college
football games in Nebraska in the 1950s.
- Find depictions of the Irish American
community in Youngstown, Ohio. In all of the Midwest. Compared to
the Italian-American communities in these areas.
- Find Jewish butchers in Chicago in the
1920s.
Publication Details
Local and Regional History Online—either the entire collection or
as regional and state subsets—is available through an annual
subscription or a one-time purchase of perpetual rights. Contact
sales@alexanderstreet.com
or your sales representative for more information.
Arcadia Publishing
Established in 1993, Arcadia Publishing is the leading publisher of
local and regional history in the United States. Their mission is to
make history accessible and meaningful and to celebrate and preserve the
heritage of America’s people and places.
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