North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories This link opens in a new windowNorth American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. The collection will be particularly useful to researchers, because much of the original material is difficult to find, poorly indexed, and unpublished; most bibliographies of the immigrant focus on secondary research; and few oral histories have been published.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories uses PhiloLogic software, developed at the University of Chicago, to enable in-depth browsing and searching of both the bibliographic and the full-text elements within the database.