The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress today announced that "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers" is debuting online with more than 226,000 pages of public domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia, and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910. The text of the newspapers is fully searchable, and search terms can be limited to a particular state, a specific newspaper, by year or years of publication and even by months.
"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages, as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH's We the People program and Digital Humanities Initiative, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.
Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative, the United States Newspaper Program.
"Chronicling America will allow students, teachers, historians -- in fact, all Americans -- access to some of our most important historical documents," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "It is one thing to read about historical events from the perspective of historians, narrated with the value of hindsight. It is entirely different to read the story as it was happening. Chronicling America will be available to the American public for free, forever; and I hope Americans will visit the site and try to imagine the emotions and actions of their forebears as those stories went to print."
"The Library congratulates all the partners in this extraordinary program to make historic newspapers available through our Web site," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "The National Digital Newspaper Program is providing access to one of our best sources of information about what was considered important to Americans at a given point in time."
