Liberal Arts Blog

Brought to you by the generosity of the Irene Bostrom Endowment in the College of Liberal Arts, Evans contains virtually every book, pamphlet and broadside published in America over a 160-year period. It contains more than 36,000 printed works and 2.3 million pages. These are primary source advertisements, almanacs, bibles, broadsides, catalogs, charters and by-laws, contracts, cookbooks, elegies, eulogies, laws, maps, narratives, novels, operas, pamphlets, plays, poems, primers, sermons, songs, speeches, textbooks, tracts, travelogues, treaties and more.

The online collection may be searched by subject and browsed by genre, subjects, author, history of printing, place of publication and language. Topics covered include agriculture, astronomy, child rearing, commerce, constitution, education, foreign affairs, medicine, military operations, operas, religious thought, revolutionary war, slavery, suffrage, work, and much more.

Posted by Naomi Lederer at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The largest dictionary of the English language is now available 24/7 to CSU affiliates. Look up the meaning of words, find their etymologies (history of the word), search for words by keywords in their definitions, search for words that beginning with a particular suffix, and much more. From their about page:
"The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books."
Take a look! If you cannot think of a word to look up OED will select one (get an entry) for you.

Posted by Naomi Lederer at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)