These 1905 images illustrate turn-of-the-century journalism as practiced by The San Francisco Call, which was published by Charles Shortridge from 1895 to 1913. This was an era of competitive journalism that began with the 1895 circulation wars between William Randolph Hearst, founder of the New York Journal (1895-1937), and Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World (1860-1931). The University of California, Riverside, contributed these images to the new "Chronicling America" digital collection of historic newspapers.
The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced the March 21 debut of "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers," a Web site containing 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 fully searchable site is available at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/.
"Chronicling America" is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress and NEH 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.
Over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all U.S. states and territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative.
During the course of this partnership, the Library of Congress will also digitize and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections. The Library's newspaper collections have grown to comprise more than 1 million current issues, more than 30,000 bound historical volumes and more than 600,000 microfilm reels. For the initial project launch, the Library contributed more than 90,000 pages from 14 different newspaper titles published in the District of Columbia between 1900 and 1910.
"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 provides access to one of our best sources of information about what was considered important to Americans at a given point in time."
"'Chronicling America' will allow students, teachers, historians—in fact, all Americans—access to some of our most important historical documents. 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," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "'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 following six institutions received the first NDNP grants to digitize papers in their respective states from the first decade of the 20th century:
- University of California, Riverside, $400,000;
- University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, $320, 959;
- University of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington, $310,000;
- New York Public Library, New York City, $351,500;
- University of Utah, Salt Lake City, $352,693; and
- Library of Virginia, Richmond, $201,226.
New NDNP awardees for inclusion in the "Chronicling America" project will be announced this summer.
