It's the next best thing to being there: Cornell University Library's Making of America (MOA) Digital Collection is a major new resource for the study of 19th-century America.

The MOA web site now provides full-text access to more than 900,000 pages of primary sources in American cultural and social history. Students, scholars and armchair historians can study 19th-century journals and other period ephemera detailing developments in culture, politics, literature and science, and it's all freely accessible on the Internet at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa .

Initially created in collaboration with the University of Michigan and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new MOA web site was developed with the support of the Library of Congress. MOA contains material published as early as 1815, with the bulk of the collection focused on publications issued between 1840 and 1900 -- from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. The collection is strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. MOA's 22 serial titles include the Atlantic Monthly,Harper's ,Scribner's and Scientific American , as well as lesser-known journals, such as American Whig Review ,The Old Guard and The Living Age . Within these publications are approximately 150,000 works by Americans, including John Muir, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, General George Custer and many others.

Equally well represented are British writers and public figures of the day. MOA also includes 267 monographs, including The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion and several local New York state histories and genealogies. In fact, genealogists and scholars of the Civil War will find an abundance of research material at the site, but anyone interested in this crucial period in American history will find something of interest.In one instance, a man in Alaska located a photograph of his wife's grandfather in a journal in the collection. His wife had never before seen a photograph of her grandfather, Beniah, a Dog Rib Indian leader. Beniah had served as a guide on an exploration of the North Country, and the photograph appeared in an article reporting on the expedition.

The user-friendly site allows searches for individual words found in the published texts, or users can browse by title, author, journal or year. Search and browse results can be displayed as images of the scanned pages or as text, and individual pages can be converted to PDF format for printing.

Cornell University Library staff members have received inquiries about the MOA collection and kudos from grateful users around the world. Comments or questions about the MOA collection can be sent to the MOA mailing list at MOA-L@cornell.edu . For more information, contact: Peter Hirtle, co-director, Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, (607) 255-3530, pbh6@cornell.edu .