I was really impressed with the Time Magazine Corpus of American English. Time is probably the most iconic magazine ever published, and has been in print since he 1920’s. I played around with the site for awhile, typing in people from Al Capone to Ronald Reagan to Adolf Hitler. Just by typing random keywords that had some historical significance over the past century you are able to find a good amount of information.

The following are some facts I found to be interesting in my searches

Kennedy: 10,078 uses in the 1960’s. I’m not too surprised here, with a president and a senator (who was running for president) who were both assassinated.

Computer: mentioned more in 1980’s (2302) than in the 1990’s (2032)

Negro: In the 1960’s, it was used 4,383 times, more than any other decade. The next decade had an enormous drop off with only 196 uses.

Vietnam: was only used 47 times in the 1960’s but in the 1990’s it was used 999 times.

The results for “negro” shows the dramatic change from the civil rights movements of the 1960’s very well. The decline in the words usage was immediate, which to me highlights an increased awareness of racial issues in short period of time.

In addition to seeing the amount of times a word was used,  you can see the context the word was used in. In my opinion this is what takes Corpora from a interesting database, to a database that is very useful for research.