Last summer at Clarion, I had the joy of instructing 19 fabulous students whose instructors also included Karen Joy Fowler, a writer and person I really admire. (Her best-known novel is The Jane Austen Book Club, but my favorite is The Sweetheart Season. And her short stories are pure genius.) We're all still on an e-mailing list, and interesting stuff comes up sometimes - this exchange was so useful I thought I'd share it with the Populace:

Former Student: I'm working on a period piece and have been doing some fascinating research at the library - the San Francisco Chronicle dates back to the mid 1800s and it's ALL on microfilm. It's giving me a lot of great details, especially the ads and the classified sections. But it's all written in formal journalist style.
I was wondering what resources might be good for learning the everyday, boring details of life in these periods. For example, if I was sitting in a trolley in 1903 and overheard a 22-year-old woman chatting with a friend, how would she speak? What would she be talking about? What would she wear and smell like? What would they eat at lunch? Where are they going and why?
Any tips?
KJF: I did a lot of this for SISTER NOON. Great fun!
Some of the things I did, in addition to the fascinating but very head-ache inducing newspapers on microfiche: try to figure out what people were reading. My book was in 1890 and Dickens was serializing one of his novels -- I forget which. There were Conan Doyles, I think. And then books I'd never heard of. But someone in a trolley can always be talking about a book, and reading books that were published at the time or a little earlier are great sources for what people were wearing and maybe how they talked (if novels are reliable guides to that.)
The newspapers are great sources of the day's scandals. In 1890, the Chronicle was full of the mysterious murders in Whitehall and the tragedy at Wounded Knee. There was a doomsday cult. There was a mysterious disease afflicting the horses. People like to talk about shocking events.
I believe there were some magazines I was able to see at the State Library. The public library in San Francisco has a good history room.
Choose one or two or three or four of the famous people from your period and read their biographies. They don't even have to be local to San Fran to give you a sense of things. Pick an area: medicine, art, politics, and research what was happening specific to that.

Student: Karen - wow, lots of great suggestions! Thank you so much! I didn't think about magazines or biographies of the time. Or that (of course) they would be discussing books and scandals on the trolley. Probably local plays, too. Lots of ads in the paper for theatre, so that would be fairly easy to explore. And I hear you on the eyestrain. I'm still amazed that so much is on microfiche, but good lord.
That said, this research is so much fun, and so easily distracting. It tickles me what made the front page in 1901 - celebrity gossip! Here's an interesting tidbit: on Feb 4, 1901 (as reported in the following day's paper), Carrie Nation got arrested in Topeka after sparking a street brawl in which her cheek got cut with her own axe. Sarah Bernhardt was accosted by yet another gentleman selling life insurance and finally capitulated, buying a policy that would augment her son's $20,000/year allowance considerably in the event of her demise. And a fresh face made her New York stage debut - Ethel Barrymore, featured in a charming comedy that won the hearts of local critics. All of this reported on the front page, above the fold.
Delia - sounds like you both agree on novels from that period. Beautiful suggestion, as is the one about memoirs. I can practically smell the musty bunny now. Do you think memoirs would be skewed toward an upper class perspective? That wouldn't be a problem, necessarily, since that's the class I'm writing about.

Delia: Memoirs are, of course, written by people who have leisure, education, and publishing contacts. In 1901, that would pretty much have been the upper classes, plus artists and politicians and other public figures who were literarily inclined. The thing you have to remember about memoirs is that memory is selective and those who want to set the record straight in public often lie. I've read memoirs of famous 19th c. courtesans that were purer invention than most modern autobiographical novels. What's interesting about them is what the kinds of lies they tell in public reveal about the society they lived in.

Other Former Student: If you want to try sparing yourself the microfilm, there are a couple of good online sources with tons of newspapers. . Newsbank seems to only have 1970 and later. Access.NewspaperArchive.com has papers going back into the 1700's. Your library probably has a link on their website you can follow to get access using your library card #.

Hope this is helpful!