The E-Sylum:  Volume 9, Number 19, May 7, 2006, Article 12

CORNELL's MAKING OF AMERICA WEB SITE

Dave Ginsburg writes: "I may be the last person on the planet
to have discovered this, but while doing some research on the
Internet, I stumbled across the "Making of America" collection,
which is a joint project of Cornell University and the University
of Michigan to host a digitized collection of 19th century books
and journals.  You can reach it by going to http:cdl.library.cornell.edu
for Cornell's digital collection and then scrolling down the page to
the link.  (The homepage for the Making of America collection has a
link to the University of Michigan's collection).  I found the
collection when I was searching for an article in the January 1852
issue of The Democratic Review concerning the Mint (and why foreign
gold coins were being exported instead of being recoined into
American coins).  From there I discovered that the collection was
searchable.  A simple boolean search (in Advanced Search) combining
"United", "States" and "Mint" and limiting the time frame to 1815
to 1870 gave me over 500 hits!

The first two were for articles in Harper's Monthly Magazine,
which led me to a 13-page article on the New York Assay Office
in the November 1861 issue.  This article was the first part of
a three-part series.  The second was a 13-page article on the
Philadelphia Mint in the December 1861 issue, while the third was
a 20-page article on the American Bank Note Company in the February
1862 issue.  Each article is profusely illustrated and minutely
examines the working methods of each subject.  I've only taken a
brief look at the University of Michigan's collection, but I saw
that they have DeBow's Review.

The articles (at least the ones I've read) are in .gif format,
so it's easy to copy each page and paste them into a Word document,
which allows easy printing and electronic storage.  What a great
resource!"

[We first discussed this web site in The E-Sylum back on April 30,
2000, but I'm sure Dave isn't the only researcher unaware of this
resource. It's high time we revisited this site.  Here's a link to
the original article. -Editor]

CORNELL's MAKING OF AMERICA WEB SITE
esylum_v03n18a03.html

Board member Larry Mitchell writes: "Among the best resources
for ancillary coverage of 19th century American numismatic
topics are the monographs and journals currently being digitized
as part of Cornell University's MAKING OF AMERICA project.
The almost 1,000,000 pages digitized to date are a treasure trove
of information for numismatists.

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

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