North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories This link opens in a new windowNorth American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories provides a personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada. It includes hundreds of thousands of pages of personal narratives, including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories. The materials begin around 1840 and extend to the present, focusing heavily on the period from 1920 to 1980.