Alexander Street Press, American Antiquarian Society partner on Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries.

Alexander Street Press has reached an agreement with the American Antiquarian Society to digitize and publish thousands of manuscript letters and diaries from the Society’s collections. The first product from this partnership will be Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society, which is scheduled for release this fall. Providing immediate access to content that has never been available in electronic form, the project marks an important milestone for students and scholars of American history. Plans for additional projects are underway.

“It’s a privilege to be working with the American Antiquarian Society,” said Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President of Alexander Street Press. “The breadth and richness of the Society’s letter and diary holdings combined with our expertise in creating carefully indexed searchable databases will open new avenues of research that will deepen the scholarly understanding of everyday life in America from Colonial times to the mid-twentieth century.”

Spanning 1750 to 1950, Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society will bring together 100,000 pages of correspondence and papers by such notable women as Ellen Tucker Emerson, eldest daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who describes life in Concord during the Civil War, and Abby Kelley Foster, noted women’s rights advocate and abolitionist, who depicts the activities of the antislavery movement in New England, New York, and Ohio. Thousands of letters and diary entries from less well known women vividly document even the smallest details of their lives and shed light on the roles women played within their families, their communities, and the social and political movements of their times.

Each letter and diary entry will be indexed using Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™, allowing researchers to identify and locate content with pinpoint accuracy. The letters and diaries will be displayed as images of the manuscripts, giving users access not only to the women’s words, but also to details revealed by the physical documents themselves. 

Ellen S. Dunlap, President of the American Antiquarian Society, noted, “We are especially pleased to be partnering with Alexander Street, as we believe that the innovative technology they have developed is particularly well-suited to our goal of preserving the manuscripts in our care while making them accessible to a much broader audience.”

Founded in 1812 and located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society is both a noted research library of early American history and a learned society that sponsors a broad range of activities, including visiting research fellowships, research and teacher enrichment programs, scholarly publications, and public lectures and concerts. Its collections of books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, ephemera, and graphics document American history and culture and are widely recognized as the most comprehensive in the nation.

Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., is an academic publisher of electronic online databases, including collections in music, history, literature, women’s studies, black studies, sociology, psychology, ethnic and diversity studies, religion, social theory, popular culture, film studies, the arts, and other areas. Alexander Street databases have won numerous awards, and the company is known for its unique and powerful organizing and indexing methods. Alexander Street Press is located in Alexandria, Virginia.

For additional information about Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society, please contact Eileen Lawrence, vice president of sales and marketing, 800-889-5937 ext. 211 or lawrence@alexanderstreet.com. Or visit http://alexanderstreet.com.