Category Archives: Newspapers

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922

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Yesterday we had a visit from Deborah Thomas from the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress, who gave a presentation on the Library’s Chronicling America website. I thought I’d write up my notes from her presentation here for anyone who was unable to attend and also for future reference.

About Chronicling America and the National Digital Newspaper Program

Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) is a website that provides access to digitised pages of selected American newspapers from 1836-1922, and is hosted and maintained by the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. This program is a partnership between the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been running since 2005. It funds state projects to digitise historic newspapers from this time period (each grant funds the digitisation of 100,000 pages), which are then made available through the Chronicling America site. The program builds on the earlier United States Newspaper Program, which inventoried, catalogued and microfilmed some 75 million pages from 140,000 historic American newspapers over a period of 25 years. The current programme aims to make a representative sample of those pages available online – right now there are almost 4.3 million pages from 25 states (and the District of Columbia), and it is hoped that eventually (within 15-20 years) all states will be covered.  The latest three states to join in are Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, and their content will start to be made available next Spring.  This state-specific approach is driven by the nature of newspaper publishing and newspaper collections in the United States – local institutions have the most comprehensive collections for their area, and there is no single national US newspaper collection as in many other countries. However, aggregating the content in the website at a national level provides a much better and more accessible online service to researchers, and this is one of the main goals of the project.

Each state is responsible for selecting the newspapers and editions that they will digitise, and so the type of content that you will find within the site varies from state to state. Some have picked long runs of a few large papers; others have picked a lot of smaller titles – Kentucky, for example, wanted to ensure that each of their eighty counties were represented in their sample.  As part of the process, the contributing institutions were asked to write short essays for each newspaper title that they digitised, explaining why they chose that title and its significance and context – these essays are all available as part of the bibliographic record for the title within the US Newspaper Directory (of which more later in this post), so you can see the rationale behind what could otherwise seem like a fairly arbitrary sample.

The material being digitised is all within the date range of 1836-1922.  The end date is determined by US copyright law, whose threshold is 1923 – all content from before that date is in the public domain and may therefore be freely digitised and made available by the Library in this way, whereas anything more recent would require the permission of a complicated network of rights-holders.  This does mean that you are able to download, copy and re-use any of the content from the site entirely freely yourself!  The start date is rather more arbitrary, but was chosen because of the increasing difficulty of digitising the older material and because the format of newspapers changes and is less consistent the further back in time you go.

Searching the site

The Chronicling America interface provides several different routes in to access the content. On the main page you will find a search bar which defaults to the basic full-text search – this allows you to search for terms and restrict your search to a specific state and/or date range. The search box here acts as a proximity search, so if you put more than one term in it will search for instances where those terms appear within five words of each other.  The digitised pages have been converted for full-text search using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can have a variable success rate – it’s less than 100%, and in some instances can even be less than 50% accurate. However chances are if you are searching for significant terms, those words will turn up more than once in an article which does compensate for this a little!

The advanced search gives you more options to construct your search terms, and allows you to restrict by more than one state and/or newspaper title as well as enter date ranges by day and month as well as year.

The next tab (All Digitized Newspapers) is the means by which you can browse the collection, either in its entirety, or by state, ethnicity, or language.  The newspapers that are included are almost entirely English-language, though there are two in French, two Hawaiian, three Spanish and one Choctaw title and more French and Spanish content will be added later this year. 

Once you have found some results, the page image interface is really nice and smooth, with scrolling zoom and click and drag, and really high quality scans. You can navigate through the full edition of that paper, and view or download page images as text and PDF (with the bibliographic information attached, ready for referencing).  You can also ‘clip’ images to get an image of part of a page – the ‘clip image’ button will essentially cut out whatever is visible in the viewer at that moment.  All the page images, and clipped images that you make, have persistent URLs, which means you can bookmark or save the link and you will always be able to get back to it.  As an example, this link will take you to the following clipped image:

US Newspaper Directory, 1690-

As well as the full-text material in Chronicling America, the site also provides access to the full US Newspaper Directory.  This contains bibliographic information about all 140,000 titles that were catalogued as part of the United States Newspaper Program, along with information about which libraries hold them. These bibliographic records also include links to full-text digitised versions both within Chronicling America and on other sites where available.  Quite often if something is in Chronicling America it will also be available online from the institution which scanned it in the first place, so you are likely to find some titles duplicated.  For the titles that are included in Chronicling America, this is where you will find the contextual essays written by the people that selected the title for inclusion.

Topics in Chronicling America

The Library of Congress also provides around 100 topic guides to the site, which are designed to give you starting points in researching a whole variety of events, subjects and themes within Chronicling America. The topics available are quite a random selection, ranging from Presidential administrations and elections, to events such as the Haymarket Affair or the Annexation of Hawaii, and people like Booker T. Washington and Nikola Tesla, as well as all sorts of other things like the ping-pong craze of 1900 to 1902.  Each topical guide gives you a bit of the background as well as links to sample articles and (perhaps most usefully), suggested search terms to use. You can see a full list of the topics at http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/topics.html, but check back again in the future as more are being created and added.

Keeping up-to-date with the site

Chronicling America is growing rapidly and continually, so it’s worth going back again and again to see if new material has been added that is relevant to your research.  The site also provides you with ways to keep up with the new content as it becomes available and to be alerted when there are additions.  You can subscribe to general updates (of content as well as points of interest and research) both by RSS and email, or subscribe to an RSS feed of just the new content as it is added, from the subscribe link available throughout the site.

And finally…
All the data from the site is freely available for re-use and can be obtained via the site’s API. To see an example of one of the innovative uses of the data from the US Newspaper Directory, see Stanford University’s data visualisation of the growth of newspapers across the United States from 1690-2011.  

African American History Resources, Part One: 20th Century

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February is Black History Month, and so I thought I’d put together a couple of blog posts about some of the resources we have available in the library for African American history.  Resources for African American history are increasingly a particular strength of the VHL’s collection, and with our recent acquisition of the electronic archives of two major black newspapers of the 20th century (The New York Amsterdam News, 1922-1993 and The Pittsburgh Courier, 1911-2002 – see this blog post for more information), we are now the only institution in Western Europe to have access to the archives of three black newspapers.  In this first blog post I will focus on 20th century African American history resources, in particular relating to civil rights, and will follow it up (by the end of the month, I promise!) with one on the 19th century and slavery & emancipation.

Newspapers

To start briefly with newspapers and periodicals (but not too extensively, as they were the subject of my last two blog posts), in addition to the three archives mentioned above, we also have a collection of 17 black journals from the first half of the twentieth century available on microfiche (to see which, take a look at our online newspapers-on-microfilm list), as well as an extensive run of the leading African American magazine, Ebony, from 1945-1954 (on microfilm) and then 1958-2008 in print.   If you’re looking for really recent African American newspapers, then Ethnic NewsWatch (via OxLIP+) provides coverage of ethnic and minority newspapers from 1990 to the present.

For more information on finding newspapers in general, take a look at the previous two posts on this blog.

Microfilm collections

The Civil Rights Era is a particular strength of our collection, and we have several microfilm collections of papers and records relating to the Civil Rights struggle.   The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Papers cover 1959-1976, and include the records and papers of this organisation, which was founded in 1942 in Chicago and advocated non-violent direct action to address racial discrimination.  A guide to the microfilm collection can be found at Micr. E 185.61 .C75455 1984.

We only have selections of the Papers of the NAACP, but even so this is a massive collection of records, speeches, reports, correspondence, branch files and campaign information from the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People.  We hold parts 1, 2, 11A, 11B, 12B, 12C, 12D, 26B, 26C, 26D, 28A, 28B, 29A, 29B, 29C, and 29D of this collection (along with guides), which cover a range of topics, locations and dates from 1909-1970.

Another substantial microfilm collection we hold is Civil rights during the Nixon Administration, which record the Nixon administration’s broadening of the concept of equal rights beyond desegregation to include affirmative action in hiring women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and an expanding and overlapping list of other groups. Even though the subject matter here is much broader, you will still find records covering the continuing controversy over school desegregation and other topics relating to African American history.

And finally for microfilms, jumping back a little in time, are the Records of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which was set up following the riot of July/August 1919 by Illinois governor Frank Lowden.

Government publications and official papers

You can, as expected, find a huge amount of material in our major government publications resources, particularly of course the US Congressional Serial Set (via OxLIP+) where you can browse for publications related to acts such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as search and browse by subject.

One thing you may not realise that we have though is a lot of the printed civil rights hearings, in particular those before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the early 1960s – search for civil rights hearings on SOLO.  Many of these are down in our stack, so you will need to place a stack request via OLIS to get them fetched up for you.

I will write further blog posts in the future about finding government publications, so keep an eye on the blog for that if you need more guidance.

Books

Just a quick note that the shelfmark range for African Americans in the Library of Congress classification is E 184.5 – E185.98.  Obviously you can search SOLO to find out what books we have, but if you want to go and browse the shelves, that’s where to head for!

Online resources

As ever, there is a huge and growing amount of fantastic primary source material being made available online.   A good starting point is the VHL’s delicious page, and the sites we have saved there tagged as African American: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/African_American.  Some particular highlights for the 20th century/civil rights are:

Finding US Newspapers II: On the web and elsewhere in the UK

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My last post focused on the newspaper sources that the VHL holds, both in print and as electronic resources.  However, there are a lot more sources of historic US newspapers freely available on the web and in library collections elsewhere in the UK.  This post will point you to some useful sites online where you can find some of these.

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ 
This is the Library of Congress’s historic newspapers site, and has two distinct purposes.  One is the Chronicling America Directory, which provides bibliographic information about newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present as well as listings of libraries in the States that have copies.   The second is to provide access to thousands of digitised pages of a wide range of newspapers from 1860-1922.   Full-text coverage is only for certain states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.   You can restrict your search by state or date range, as well as search within a specific newspaper title.  Pages can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs or image files.

The Library of Congress also provides a couple of different ways into the collection.  There is the topics interface, which allows you to browse articles relating to a wide range of topics, from Presidential administrations and events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, to the baseball World Series, Butch Cassidy, or Nikola Tesla.  They are also working with Flickr, uploading images of cover pages from the New York Tribune‘s illustrated newspaper supplements.  They even make their API available, for anyone wanting to create different ways to explore the data.

Google News Archive
http://news.google.com/newspapers 
As well as the Google Books project, Google are also digitising thousands and thousands of pages of newspapers, and the Google News Archive page allows you to browse these directly.  It’s a very basic interface, with just an alphabetical listing of all the newspaper titles available, and information as to what dates are covered, but once you click on a specific title you are brought to a nice timeline view, from where you can easily browse issues by date.  It being Google, the search function is very straightforward, but there is an advanced search available from the very tiny link next to the search box at the top of the page.
 
Newspapers on Footnote.com
http://go.footnote.com/newspapers/
Footnote.com is a subscription website that works with the National Archives to digitise vast quantities of records, images and archival material, as well as encouraging the public to add annotations and upload their own material.   They also have a large collection of digitised newspapers, comprising some 4 million pages.   You can search the collections without signing up, but be aware that a lot of the content is only available to paid subscribers, so you may not be able to see the full-text if you have not paid over your subscription fee.

NewspaperCat
http://www.newspapercat.org/
NewspaperCat is an online catalogue of digitised historical newspapers from the United States and Caribbean, hosted by the University of Florida.  It currently links through to over 1000 titles and is expanding.   You can search or browse by title or location.

Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
The Internet Archive is the other major site for freely available digitised material on the web, and contains scanned images of books and journals from many major American libraries, including therefore also newspaper issues.   However, tt is not the easiest site to search, particularly for newspapers and periodicals as the search results list doesn’t show you the date of the item, you can’t browse, and there’s no way to limit your search to this kind of material.  Worth checking though if you know the title you’re looking for and have struck out elsewhere – you might be in luck!

Various local digitisation projects
Examples on the VHL’s delicious page: http://www.delicious.com/vhllib/Newspapers 
More comprehensive listing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives#United_States 
There are a huge number of digitisation projects by University and State libraries, archives and historical societies all over the US, and many of these include newspapers.  Some are distinct projects to digitise runs of specific newspapers, whereas others are wider projects that include newspaper articles, pages or entire issues within them.   I’ve been saving any I’ve come across on the VHL delicious page, but find more and more all the time.  There’s also an excellent listing available on Wikipedia, as well as one provided by Penn Libraries.   If I haven’t already found a site that’s useful to you, then it’s always worth checking the website of the relevant State Historical Society and major University libraries.  The content available and presentation of the interfaces may vary wildly from place to place, but overall there’s an awful lot of good stuff out there.

Newspaper holdings elswhere in the UK
Between them, libraries in the UK hold quite a wide range of US newspapers, so if you can’t find things here in Oxford or online, you may well be able to track them down in other libraries.   The best starting place is the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, and you can search their newspaper catalogues online.

For other libraries in the UK as well, the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) maintains a list of US newspaper holdings on their website, which can be searched and browsed by title, and will tell you which UK library holds what.  One caveat about this list is that it relies on the invidual libraries updating BAAS when their holdings change, so you’d be wise to check with the individual library that they definitely do have what you’re looking for before making a trip.

December 7, 1941: Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor

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One thing I thought might be fun to do on occasion on this blog is to showcase some individual documents from our various resources that tie in with events and days in history.  Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and today is the anniversary of the USA’s declaration of war on Japan and entry into World War II (mutual declarations of war with Germany and Italy followed a few days later).  I’ve had a look through some of our e-resources to see what I could find relating to the Pearl Harbor attack, as follows:

Newspapers and contemporary reports
We have electronic access to the archives of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. You can search them individually or both at once, if you select them both on the first screen you come to after clicking through from OxLIP+.   Searching both for December 8, 1941 brings up a large number of articles and editorials, and you can also get to images of the front pages of both papers from that day.

Link to full page image (Oxford users only)


Link to full page image (Oxford users only)

 
The official response
The US Congressional Serial Set is our major e-resource for US government publications. I’ll write in more detail about it in forthcoming blog posts, but it contains all the reports and documents submitted to Congress from 1817-1994.  A search for ‘Pearl Harbor’ and ‘1941’ brings up both the House and Senate Documents from the Joint Session where President Roosevelt addressed Congress and requested that they declare war:

Serial Set Vol. No. 10599, Session Vol. No.22
77th Congress, 1st Session
H.Doc. 453
State of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. Address from the President of the United States before a joint session of the two houses of Congress requesting that Congress declare that there exists a state of war between the United States and the Japanese empire. December 8, 1941. 

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

The President’s address can also be found in the Congressional Record, along with the resolution to declare war and the record of the proceedings in the Joint Session. We don’t have the Congressional Record as an electronic resource, but the print volumes are all held in the library – the volume that includes the proceedings on December 8th is v.87, pt.24.  The Senate record also includes various newspaper editorials in response to the attack that were entered into the record at the request of Senator Bridges.  This is the kind of material that is sometimes additionally found in the Congressional Record that you might not otherwise expect or be able to get hold of here in Oxford, as we don’t have holdings of many US newspapers for the 20th century.
 
Another Pearl Harbor-related document that you can find in the Serial Set is the report of the commission appointed by the President to investigate the attack, which was submitted to the Senate in January 1942.

Serial Set Vol. No. 10676, Session Vol. No.8
77th Congress, 2nd Session
S.Doc. 159
Attack upon Pearl Harbor by Japanese armed forces. Report of the commission appointed by the President of the United States to investigate and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

Link to access the full document from the Congressional Serial Set (Oxford users only)

On the web: Eyewitness accounts and more
As ever, there is a huge amount of material available on the internet, including eyewitness accounts, oral histories, documents and images of all sorts.  Here’s just a sample of things available on the web related to the Pearl Harbor attack:

  • World War II diaries (Footnote.com): Footnote.com is a subscription website, but regularly makes parts of its collections free for a month at a time.  For December, they have opened up their World War II diaries collection.  Most of the content starts in 1942, but it does include this eyewitness account of the 1941 attack.
  • Hawaii War Records Depository Photos: a wealth of digitised photographs documenting the impact of World War II in Hawaii, which were deposited at the Hawaii War Records Depository at the University of Hawaii.  The collection includes 86 images related to the Pearl Harbor attack.
  • Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (University of California): Not about the attack per se, but this online archive contains a huge number of images (photographs, paintings and drawings) and some documents relating to the internment of Japanese Americans following the attack.
  • Various oral histories can also be found on YouTube, and even some old film footage, such as the video embedded below.

For more links to freely available web resources, take a look at the VHL’s delicious page.