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EDITORIAL: Library of Congress puts historic U.S. newspapers online to see how media covered history as it was made
Jul 06, 2009 (Fort Worth Star-Telegram - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Forget red states and blue states, or Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- the biggest split in America today might be between those who savor their news in print with their morning coffee and those who prefer quick hits using some newfangled handheld digital device.
But for those who fear newspapers are disappearing -- and those who wouldn't mind if they did -- the Library of Congress has found middle ground of sorts.
It's called Chronicling America, an online compilation of historic American newspapers that shows vividly how they've recorded history as it was being made.
The searchable database at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ includes pages from newspapers covering 1880 to 1922 from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
The project's goal is to get papers from all the states into the database, but it's a slow process, given that it's funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to libraries that actually do the work of digitizing pages. The University of North Texas libraries, for instance, got an NEH grant for 2007-2009 to digitize newspapers from 1880 through 1910, according to the Library of Congress Web site.
Texas papers in the collection at this point are the Fort Worth Gazette, Houston Daily Post, Jefferson Jimplecute, Palestine Daily Herald and The Jewish Herald from Houston.
Sample headlines from the Fort Worth Gazette in December 1890:
From Washington, D.C.: "No quorum can be secured in either house this week, and force bill pushers are hustling."
From Dallas: "A bit of scandal well developed in which a married doctor and a young woman are the principals."
From San Antonio: "Met with shotguns. Passengers from Houston not allowed to stop at stations in Fort Bend County."
But the best might be this Dec. 26 dispatch datelined Hubbard City: "Mrs. S.F. Dellis, wife of a well-to-do farmer of this section, came to town today with her daughter to do some shopping. They visited several places and were to wind up the day's shopping by purchasing a hat for the daughter at a fashionable millinery store. Here the mother left her daughter to select a hat while she went to the post office a short distance away. Returning after a few minutes she found her daughter gone. Nothing strange was thought of at first, however, but finally growing tired of waiting she began to inquire into her daughter's whereabouts. But no one had seen the missing girl, when finally it was learned at a livery stable that, in company with a young man of the neighborhood, she had hurriedly left the stable, going in the direction of Hillsboro. Mrs. Dellis then understood what it all meant and good-naturedly returned home minus the daughter, leaving word for them to return home after the wedding tour."
Newspapers are rapidly changing. Human nature, it seems, carries on.
To see more of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or to subscribe to the newspaper,
go to http://www.dfw.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email
tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax
to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave.,
Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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