Chronicling America is another expansive source for exploring historical American newspapers. This online archive from the Library of Congress contains papers dating from 1756 to 1963 and from all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
“Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and 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 (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages” [Text taken from the Chronicling America About page].
The website has an advanced search function that allows users to customize the location, date range, newspapers, languages, ethnicities, page number, and keywords. Additionally, the collection contains organized research guides for categories such as: highlighted topics, monthly observances and celebrations, themes in history, and wars or conflicts.
Chronicling America has a total of 30 Richmond, VA newspapers to choose from. Each newspaper has an information page that gives a detailed description of its history, years active, publication information, as well as links to its first and last issues in the database. Pictured below is a portion of the “About page” for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, followed by its first cover page from November 14, 1914.
Chronicling America’s “About page” for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Those interested in Chronicling America may
also find its Newspaper Navigator helpful and fun to use.
This project consists of two parts: a dataset of extracted visual content from
over 16 million historic newspapers in Chronicling
America, and a search tool where the user can use machine learning to find and
save desired images from these newspapers by inputting keywords, date range,
and state.
“The visual similarity search capability retrieves relevant photos by empowering you to train a machine learning algorithm by selecting photos that you are interested in. The application contains 1.56 million photos from the Newspaper Navigator dataset, consisting of all extracted photos in the dataset published between 1900 and 1963 with confidence scores above 90%” [Text taken from the Newspaper Navigator About page].
The project also gives access to some pre-packaged datasets for specific years and image types. Below are some Richmond newspaper pictures found with the Newspaper Navigator search mechanism.
Photos of chickens from the annual Richmond Poultry Show from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jan. 14, 1913, from Chronicling America's Newspaper Navigator dataset.
- Gabrielle Dietrich, VCU undergraduate majoring in International Studies and French with a minor in History. She graduates in the Spring of 2024
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