What did people, from the most ancient times to the most recent, eat, wear, and use? What did they hope, invent, and sing? What did they love, fear, or hate? These are the kinds of questions that anyone interested in history has to ask. We spend our lives preoccupied with food, shelter, families, neighbors, work, and play. Our activities rarely make the headlines, but it is by looking at people’s everyday lives that we can truly understand history. Greenwood Daily Life Online brings into focus the vast majority of human beings whose existence is often neglected by the standard reference sources. Here you will meet the anonymous men and women of the past going about their everyday tasks and in the process creating the world that we know.

Greenwood Daily Life Online is designed for general readers without a background in the subject. The content is fully integrated, engaging and accessible, and varied in its form. Readers can explore full-length reference books, book chapters, encyclopedia articles, primary documents, “Tours through Time,” images, maps, chronologies, and links to vetted websites, all centered on everyday life. Not only does Greenwood Daily Life Online provide lots of information about everyday life, but, through robust search capabilities and three different browsing options—chronological, geographical, and topical—it makes it easy for readers to find what they looking for, study it in more depth, connect it to related topics, find images and primary documents, and, in short, understand what they are studying.

Greenwood Daily Life Online provides various ways to enter the database and to move about to follow leads in many directions, including from beginning to end. Here’s how it works:

Pick a topic: Let’s say, “Children in Traditional China.” The “Quick Search” engine offers readers a fast way into this information, but unlike some other databases, we organize the results. Students can choose Book Chapters, Encyclopedia Articles, Images, or Primary Documents – all offering entries into knowledge at varying degrees of depth. An “Advanced Search” screen offers readers the opportunity to limit their searches to produce more targeted results.

Now let’s do this differently: Click on the map of Asia and see that Daily Life is organized in seven categories. Choose “Domestic Life” (since children are within the family structure) and see the results that emerge. Readers are led to the Encyclopedia Article on Chinese children, and from there they see a range of resources. They can go to the “Related Entries” on the left of the screen or to “Additional Resources” on the right. One of these resources is a link to the book, Daily Life in Traditional China. By clicking on that link, a reader goes to the beginning of that reference book and can follow the text from the first page to the last, or any portion in between. Alternatively, readers can choose the general topics (arranged conceptually at the top of the entry) “Children” or “Domestic Life” to see how Chinese children were similar and different from children in other parts of the world during that time.

Here’s yet another way into information: Some people are not sure what they are interested in, so we have prepared “Tours through Time,” which are short thumbnail essays – either visual or with primary texts – that glance at topics across time and cultures. As researchers look quickly at churches, or graffiti, or weapons, or many other topics, they are invited to link to knowledge in depth from each of the thumbnail descriptions.

We have designed Greenwood Daily Life Online to be a dynamic product that will continue to explore the way people have lived throughout time across the globe. Launching with a substantial collection of nearly thirty reference works fully enhanced for the digital environment, the site will grow and be thoroughly updated each year with the addition of high-quality reference and general-interest titles. The cultures and customs of the contemporary world, American regional cultures, food, and sports are topics that will be brought into the site and explored in great depth in the near future. Other topics will follow. As we add more books and information to the already abundant database, we will do so in ways that continue to make this one of the most user-friendly educational sites available. We see that people are shown at their best (and sometimes their worst) in the day-to-day activities that reveal our humanity. The content of this database reveals both the deep similarities and fascinating differences among people all over the world. It’s our belief that we can participate in our global village more intelligently the more we understand each other’s lives. We hope that our readers will come to a renewed appreciation of an often-spoken but seldom-felt reality: at the most basic level all humans, across time and space, share concerns, pleasures, and aspirations, but the way these are expressed are infinite in their range.

Joyce E. Salisbury