Questia.Com

Hi folks

Question -- Has anyone used the questia online library? Questia.Com If you have, what is your impression? Is it worth the subscription price?

Jeff

 

Well I never got any feedback on this one, but subscribed anyway. It is quite a database, and think it will be worth the price for my purposes anyway.

Jeff.

 

Daisy.

Books is my life. Grammer are my being. I am swimming in paper. One can never have too many books -- I have a personal library approaching 10,000 volumes and pieces of historical ephemera. I also am a working author and working editor for a major (nameless university press). I do peer review work for materials in my field of expertise.

As for being curious about Questia, I accepted a commission a few months back to prepare some materials for the Jamestown quadricentennial, so the desire of convenience over waiting for inter-library loan requests to come, postage costs, etc. I subscribed on Monday, and it has already paid for itself in savings on ILL fees.

Yep, I am a working librarian -- manager of a relatively new small town community library, with a relatively small budget for acquisitions. A lot of what we stock reflects the community and not me personally, although it is inevitable that my imprint is there as well.

 

Bro. Robert

You can go to their web page, questia.com and search to see if they have it in their database. They claim almost 50,000 books and about 200,000 articles, so it is extensive. I did a search on Primitive Baptist and came back with about 100 references.

I'll run a quick reference and report back.

J

 

Bro. Robert

Found a couple of references for you:

2406. Hall, P. M. The 'Musical Million': A Study and Analysis of the Periodical Promoting Music Reading through Shape-notes in North America from 1870 to 1914 . Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1970.

The phrase "gospel music" was first widely used after 1875, when a book called Gospel Hymns and Sacred Tunes appeared in the North. The South was an early participant in the movement, as the Ruebush-Kieffer Company, founded in 1866 in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, popularized a shape-note system based on seven rather than the older four-note scheme. Kieffer founded the South's first normal singing school in 1874 to train teachers who fanned out all over the South; he also started a periodical called The Musical Million and published seven-note songbooks for the teachers to carry with them. Advertisements praised the songbooks as especially suitable for extended "special singings." The music bore strong similarities to its secular contemporaries. It was simplified, optimistic, rhythmic, sentimental. Some gospel songs written in the North--such as "Bringing in the Sheaves" and "What a Friend We Have in Jesus"--became especially associated with the South. Other songs--such as "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Keep on the Firing Line"--were propelled by the martial imagery of Protestant missionaries. 51


This is a paragraph from:

The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
Book by Edward L. Ayers; Oxford US, 1992

The footnote (51) is to Charles K. Wolfe, "Gospel Music, White," in Wilson and Ferris, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 1013-14; Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., 12.

A reference to the East Texas Musical Convention is in this article: Old Can Be Used Instead of New Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South, 1880-1920
Journal article by Gavin James Campbell; Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 110, 1997


If you don't have it, send me an email, and we will work it out.

Jeff.

 

I have subscribed to it, and do find it useful for historical research -- not primary sources but you do get access to full text books, including bibliographies (which I tend to think are more important than a lot of the narrative.)

Now if it would just write this book for me, I'd be set.