A Useful Tool: The Google NGram Viewer

[Championhilz]

I just discovered a new feature on Google that might be useful for Civil War researchers - the Ngram Viewer. This feature lets you search all of Google Books (more than 5 million volumes) for specific words and phrases. Then it creates a graph showing their frequency of use over time.
For example, I put in the term "Johnny Reb" and found that it came into use in the early 1860s, and the chart showed its frequency of use up to modern times.

The Ngram Viewer can be found here: https://books.google.com/ngrams

 

[Championhilz]

Another interesting thing you can do is put in multiple terms and see how many times each was used - for example, i put in the terms "Vicksburg" and "Gettysburg" and found that Vicksburg was mentioned much more in publications during the Civil War than Gettysburg was.

 

[E_just_E]

Another interesting thing you can do is put in multiple terms and see how many times each was used - for example, i put in the terms "Vicksburg" and "Gettysburg" and found that Vicksburg was mentioned much more in publications during the Civil War than Gettysburg was.

Books. Only books. That is part of the downside of this tool. It does not calculate newspaper/periodical mentions, unless those articles have been bound into books, with for 1863 happened much later.

 

[James B White]

Books and a few magazines, with what seems to be a southern and/or agricultural slant. They have sporadic bound annual copies of antebellum DeBow's Review, the American Cotton Planter, Monthly Journal of Agriculture, the Agricultural Magazine, and I've also run into a few Godeys, Southern Literary Messengers, and medical journals. I don't know if they would be enough to change things statistically on an n-gram though, and of course newspapers being omitted would have a big influence.