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Digital Archives: Diaries

Diaries Online

American Memory from the Library of Congress [Freely available electronic resource]
Run a search for 'diary' in the search interface to see a list of the thousands of diaries and related materials that are available or browse through specific sections.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography [Penn only]
Transcriptions of narratives collected under the direction of the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1939, and initially published under the title Slave Narratives: a folk history of slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves.
Civil War Women: Primary Sources on the Internet [Freely available electronic resource]
Documenting the American South [Freely available electronic resource]
Resource from the University of North Carolina. Collections include "First-Person Narratives of the American South," "North American Slave Narratives," and "True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina." The included narratives cover the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Run a search for 'diary' in the search interface to see a list of the hundreds of diaries and related materials that are available or browse through specific sections.
In the First Person [Freely available electronic resource]
"In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records. The index contains approximately 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letter entries, and 17,000 oral history entries."
To limit your results to diaries available in full-text through this resource, click on the box next to "full text" in the search form.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950 [Freely available electronic resource]
Fulltext of letters and diaries, published and manuscript, of American women during the Colonial period through 1950.
The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War [Freely available electronic resource]
"The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown's Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive, you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania." To search just diaries, click on "Letters & Diaries" in the appropriate time period and then "Search the Letters & Diaries." You will then see an option to search only diaries.

Last Updated: Jan 23, 2023 12:54 PM
URL: https://guides.library.upenn.edu/Digital_Archives
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Subjects: English

Tags: Research Guide