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The Readex Report: In Praise of Librarians and Archivists; Of Presidents and Papers; Ephemeral Loyalties; and Playing Hardball

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

In our latest issue: A professor lauds his colleagues in the library; dissecting a timeless inaugural speech; consumption versus nationalism in early America; and the unheralded impact of a hard-swinging civil rights giant.

In Praise of Librarians and Archivists: Appreciating the Colleagues Who Make Professors’ Jobs Easier

By Mark Cheathem, Associate Professor of History, Cumberland University

Since I was a child begging my mother to take me to the library on a daily basis, I have appreciated the designated keepers of books. Conducting research as an undergraduate student made me aware of the specialized jobs that academic librarians did every day to make life easier for the clueless young people like me who wandered into the building with no idea about how to find academic journal articles or primary sources…. (read article)

Of Presidents and Papers

By Martha King, Associate Editor, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, established at Princeton University, is preparing the authoritative and comprehensive edition of the correspondence and papers of our nation’s third president. As historians editing Jefferson’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, we are responsible for gathering documents and making them available to posterity in an accurate, transcribed, and contextualized format through our published and digital editions…. (read article)

Ephemeral Loyalties? Consumption, Commerce and Jeffersonian Politics, 1806-1815

By Joanna Cohen, School of History at Queen Mary, University of London

While the Revolution may have secured Americans their political independence, economic independence remained elusive. As early as 1783, Americans realized that they had not extricated themselves in any meaningful way from the mercantile system of the Atlantic world, still dominated by European imperial might…. (read article)

Playing Hardball: Brushing Off the Memory of a Civil Rights Giant

By Harvey M. Kahn, Humanities Reporter

Many scholars consider Rube Foster’s impact on the civil rights movement as important as that of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, or any other early twentieth-century figure. Today, with the exception of diehard baseball fans, few people recognize his name…. (read article)

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Key Titles in African American Periodicals, 1825-1995: Part One of Three

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, reflects more than a century and half of the African American experience. The first collection in Readex’s new America’s Historical Periodicals series, this wide-ranging resource features more than 170 titles from 26 states. Below is a brief description of seven of these publications. For descriptions of fourteen others, please visit the Key Periodicals page on the Readex website.

The Voice of the Negro (Atlanta, Georgia)

A literary journal aimed at a national audience of African Americans, The Voice of the Negro was published from 1904 to 1907. It published writings by Booker T. Washington, as well as a younger generation of black activists and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope, Kelly Miller, Mary Church Terrell and William Pickens. It also featured poetry by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James D. Corrothers and Douglas Johnson.

• Includes issues published between 1904 and 1907

The Colored American Magazine (Boston, Massachusetts)

One of the most prominent vehicles for black intellectual, artistic, and political expression during the first decade of the 20th century, The Colored American was edited by Pauline Hopkins, African American novelist, playwright and journalist. The magazine’s masthead read: “An Illustrated Monthly Devoted to Literature, Science, Music, Architecture, Facts, Fiction, and Traditions of the Negro Race.”

• Includes issues published between 1902 and 1908

The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (Washington, D.C.)

Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Horizon was the precursor to The Crisis—Du Bois’ groundbreaking publication for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. However, The Horizon was a very different publication in that it functioned as an aggregator of news from other sources, as well as an outlet for its editors’ views. It had three main sections: “The In-Look” was a digest of the “Negro-American press,” “The Out-Look” was a digest of the periodical press, and “The Over-Look” was a digest of opinions and general catch-all for books, political discussions, and the views of Du Bois and his editors. It ceased publication in 1910 when Du Bois started The Crisis.

• Includes issues published between 1907 and 1910

The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (New York, New York)

The official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis was founded by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910 and is widely considered one of the most important African American publications of the twentieth century. Primarily a current-affairs journal promoting the NAACP’s liberal program of social reform and racial equality, The Crisis also included poems, reviews and essays on culture and history. “The object of this publication,” Du Bois wrote, “is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people. It takes its name from the fact that the editors believe that this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of men.”

• Includes issues published between 1910 and 1922

The Negro: A Review (St. Louis, Missouri)

Billed as “America’s Best Negro Monthly,” The Negro: A Review contained articles, illustrations, advertisements and short stories. Edited by Frederick Bond in St. Louis, it was one of the only general interest African American magazines published in the Midwest during World War II.

• Includes issues published between 1943 and 1948

The African World (Greensboro, North Carolina)

Published first by the Student Organization for Black Unity, The African World described itself as the “Voice of the Revolutionary Pan-African Youth Movement in the Americas.” It contained articles and photographs covering civil rights, the youth movement, prison abuse, and the exploitation of African American workers. Its founders later helped form, and publicize, the February First Movement, the civil rights group named for the date in 1960 when four African American students asserted their right to sit at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

• Includes issues published between 1971 and 1975

Black Careers (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

A bi-monthly journal that did much to educate African American job seekers about the importance of Equal Opportunity Employment legislation, Black Careers contained articles on employment trends, educational opportunities and discrimination in employment. It was also popular with teachers in inner city schools due to its profiles of role models from the African American business community.

• Includes issues published between 1977 and 1982

For more information about African American Periodicals, 1825-1995, please write to readexmarketing@readex.com. To request trial access for your institution, please use this form.

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Early American Newspapers, Series 1: Key Titles and Their Nameplates

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Artist: Joseph H. Davis (1811-1865). Title: Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Otis and Child (1834). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Focusing on the 18th and early 19th centuries, the first series of Early American Newspapers offers over 350,000 issues from more than 710 titles. This widely used digital collection, based primarily on Clarence S. Brigham’s authoritative “History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820,” contains newspapers from 23 states and the District of Columbia.

Below is a brief description—and the nameplate—of several key titles:

Albany Register (New York)
One of the most successful and influential American newspapers of the late 18th and early 19th century, the Register was edited from 1808 to 1822 by the ardent anti-Federalist Solomon Southwick.

• Includes 485 issues published between 1794 and 1813. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 1,462 issues published between 1789 and 1822.

American Beacon (Norfolk, Virginia)
Published by a ship captain in the busy 19th-century seaport of Norfolk, the Beacon focused on seafaring activities.

• Includes 1,670 issues published between 1815 and 1820

American Mercury (Hartford, Connecticut)
With a reputation for outspokenness, the Mercury was for many years Connecticut’s leading reform paper as well as a key proponent of ensuring legal equality for religious sects.

• Includes 2,586 issues published between 1784 and 1829. Coverage between 1830 and 1833 will be found in Early American Newspapers, Series 6

American Minerva (New York)
Self-described as “Patroness of Peace, Commerce, and the Liberal Arts,” Noah Webster’s federalist newspaper was established to support the policies of President George Washington.

• Includes 744 issues published between 1793 and 1796

American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Founded in 1719 and the first newspaper in the Colonies to be published outside Boston, the Mercury was well known for its essays on political liberty.

 

• Includes 1,370 issues published between 1719 and 1746

Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock)
One of the first newspapers west of the Mississippi, the Gazette was founded 16 years before Arkansas achieved statehood. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it remained one of the most influential newspapers in the region.

 

• Includes 337 issues published between 1819 and 1826. Early American Newspapers, Series 6 includes 8,638 issues of the Arkansas Gazette published between 1820 and 1900.

Boston News-Letter (Massachusetts)
Established in 1704, the News-Letter was the first regularly published newspaper in the British Colonies of North America. Noted for its pro-British sympathies, the News-Letter went through a succession of printers, including Margaret Draper, one the few women printers of the 18th century.

• Includes 3,500 issues published between 1704 and 1776

City Gazette (Charleston, South Carolina)
The City Gazette provides extensive coverage of the culture and history of Antebellum South Carolina, including the invention of the cotton gin and the rise of slavery.

• Includes 10,306 issues published between 1787 and 1821. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 3,011 issues published between 1712 and 1826, and Series 4 includes 1,864 issues published between 1827 and 1833.

Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.)
As the official publication for Congressional reports, the Intelligencer’s government news was shipped to editors across the country.

• Includes 2,127 issues published between 1813 and 1820. Early American Newspapers, Series 6 includes 16,763 issues published between 1821 and 1869.

Eastern Argus (Portland, Maine)
This long-running weekly argued for Maine’s independence from Massachusetts.

• Includes 2,582 issues published between 1803 and 1833. Early American Newspapers, Series 3 includes 488 issues published between 1833 and 1880, and Series 7 will include issues published between 1835 and 1876.

Enquirer (Richmond, Virginia)
This influential southern newspaper was edited and published for 41 years by leading American journalist Thomas Ritchie. Of the Enquirer, Thomas Jefferson wrote:” I read but a single newspaper, Ritchie’s Enquirer, the best that is published or ever has been published in America.” Later issues of the Enquirer offer perspectives on the Confederacy’s reaction to Reconstruction.

• Includes 1,905 issues published between 1804 and 1820. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 258 issues published between 1838 and 1865, and Series 6 will include issues published between 1866 and 1876.

Evening Post (New York City)
First published by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 as a broadside, the Post remains today the oldest continuously published daily in the country. It gained national fame under the editorship of poet and abolitionist William Cullen Bryant.

• Includes 6,090 issues published between 1801 and 1821. Early American Newspapers, Series 7 will include issues published between 1822 and 1876.

Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, New Hampshire)
The Cabinet is especially noteworthy for remaining neutral when many newspapers of its time were openly influenced by political controversy.

• Includes 4,943 issues published between 1802 and 1879

Georgia Gazette (Savannah)
Georgia’s first newspaper, the Gazette provides a rich record of southern colonial life.

• Includes 363 issues published between 1763 and 1770. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 600 issues published between 1788 and 1802. Early American Newspapers, Series 5, includes 19 issues published in 1803.

Massachusetts Spy (Boston and Worcester)
Initially neutral but soon openly supporting the Patriots, the Massachusetts Spy was arguably the most important newspaper in America leading up to the Revolution. It was co-founded by Isaiah Thomas, one of the most successful and colorful journalists of the 18th century and founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

• Includes 283 issues published in Boston between 1770 and 1775, and 2,371 issues published in Worcester between 1775 and 1820. Early American Newspapers, Series 6 will include issues published between 1821 and 1876.

National Aegis (Worcester, Massachusetts)
Offering a political counterpoint to Worcester’s Federalist paper, the Massachusetts Spy, the Aegis defended Jeffersonian Republicanism throughout its run.

• Includes 989 issues published between 1801 and 1820. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 155 issues published between 1825 and 1827, and Series 7 will include issues published between 1821 and 1876.

New-England Courant (Boston)
Shortly after founding the Courant in 1721, James Franklin was imprisoned and his paper suppressed for its radical views against the General Court. Franklin’s younger brother, Benjamin, who had been serving his apprenticeship at the Courant, assumed control of the paper in 1723. Benjamin Franklin’s early writings, under the name Silence Dogood, appear in this paper.

• Includes 243 issues published between 1721 and 1726

New-Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth)
The first newspaper in the state of New Hampshire, the Gazette is also one the nation’s oldest existing papers.

• Includes 4,140 issues published between 1756 and 1833. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 415 issues published between 1836 and 1844, Series 3 includes 486 issues published between 1834 and 1851, Series 4 includes 772 issues published between 1836 and 1851, and Series 7 will include issues published between 1852 and 1876.

Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia)
Published by Benjamin Franklin, this prominent 18th-century newspaper contains not only in-depth articles on every aspect of Colonial America but also the full text of many seminal government documents, including the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

• Includes 635 issues published between 1742 and 1757. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 1,524 issues published between 1736 and 1775

Providence Patriot (Rhode Island)
The Patriot, an influential and often eloquent paper, provides a local look at two early race riots: the 1824 Hardscrabble Riot and the 1831 Snow Town Riot in which working class whites attacked African American residents. Unable to control the violent mob, Providence officials requested that the Governor send in military troops.

• Includes 1,507 issues published between 1814 and 1829. Early American Newspapers, Series 2 includes 1,192 issues published between 1814 and 1834.

Publick Occurrences (Boston)
The first newspaper in North America, Publick Occurrences: Both Forreign and Domestick was published for the first and last time on September 26, 1690 before being shut down for printing “sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports” without royal consent.

• Includes the single issue published in 1690

Vermont Gazette (Bennington)
Publisher Anthony Haswell, who brought the first printing press to Vermont, was jailed for publishing articles in the Gazette that criticized the United States’ newly established government.

• Includes 2,199 issues published between 1783 and 1832. Early American Newspapers, Series 3 includes 105 issues published between 1843 and 1844, and Series 5 includes 834 issues published between 1832 and 1850.

For more information about Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876, please contact readexmarketing@readex.com or visit our website.  To request a free trial for your institution, please use this form.

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Newly Discovered Materials Enrich Early American Imprints

Monday, October 10th, 2011

Nearly 2,000 rare printed items from the Library Company of Philadelphia—previously unavailable in the Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker series—have been digitized by Readex.

Available in two parts, Supplements from the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1670-1819 may now be seamlessly searched and browsed within Readex’s fully integrated America’s Historical Imprints collection—the definitive resource for researching every aspect of 17th- and 18th-century America.

Representing the largest collection of early American imprints to have been identified and cataloged during the last 40 years, these new series of remarkable printed materials include items relevant to a host of humanities topics and are representative of numerous genres of colonial print. These newly discovered materials are particularly valuable for studying popular culture; many emanate from the middle and lower orders of society.

Early American Imprints, Series I:

Supplement from the Library Company

of Philadelphia, 1670-1800

Sample Documents – Title List – Request Trial


Early American Imprints, Series II:

Supplement from the Library Company

of Philadelphia, 1801-1819

Sample Documents – Title List – Request Trial

 “These collections are rich in imprints that have never before been available in the digital Early American Imprints because they came to light after the completion of the bibliographies on which it was based,” says James N. Green, the Library Company’s Librarian. “By adding them to their Archive of Americana, Readex has made it even more truly the national digital library of early American print.”

 

For more information or to arrange a product trial, please contact Readex at 800.762.8182, sales@readex.com or use this form.

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The Digital Detective: Tracking Criminals When the Trail Runs Cold (by Stephen Mihm)

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

[The article below by University of Georgia professor Stephen Mihm first appeared in The Readex Report (Sept. 2008). Last month, an op-ed by Mihm headlined "The Biographer's New Best Friend" was published in The New York Times Sunday Review section. In his Times piece, Mihm quotes historians and biographers James McGrath Morris, Joshua Kendall and Graham Hodges to help explain why "Readex's America's Historical Newspapers...has the potential to revolutionize biographical research."]

The Digital Detective: Tracking Criminals When the Trail Runs Cold

By Stephen Mihm, Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia

When I began work on a history of American counterfeiting between the Revolution and the Civil War, I was faced with some peculiar research problems. With a few rare exceptions, counterfeiting during this period was a crime that was not prosecuted by federal authorities. The problem was instead left to state and local law enforcement officials who were often outnumbered and incompetent. This was partly a consequence of the fact that the paper money in circulation originated not with the federal government, but with hundreds of state-chartered banks. But it was also a reflection of the relative weakness of the federal government’s policing.

And therein lay a serious problem, not only for the police of the day, but for the historian who would attempt to reconstruct this kind of criminal activity. Counterfeiting involved vast numbers of players spread out across state and even national lines. This meant that local law enforcement officials often operated in the dark as to the scope and scale of the network of manufacturers, distributors, retailers and passers of bogus bills. Local law enforcement records—what few have survived—often provide but a fleeting snapshot of an individual counterfeiter who typically posted bail and fled, never to be seen again. What, then, is a historian to do, particularly a historian who wants to reconstruct the entire criminal careers of some of these colorful individuals?

When I began research for A Nation of Counterfeiters, I started keeping tabs on the names of criminals who surfaced at multiple times and places in the historical record. But this is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack: you could spend many lifetimes reading through newspapers and other sources, trying to track your quarry. The advent of a new generation of digital resources—particularly America’s Historical Newspapers—made life much easier, and netted results that not only surprised me, but would have stunned the detectives and bounty hunters who spent so much time unsuccessfully tracking counterfeiters in the early republic.

Take a man like Seneca Paige. The epitaph of his gravestone notes that he was a “poor man’s friend,” a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that he was the head of a counterfeiting syndicate that straddled the border between Vermont and Canada. Paige was a notoriously slippery individual, someone who constantly escaped from the clutches of the law. That initially made tracking him almost absurdly difficult. I made a few serendipitous finds in records on both sides of the border, but when I ran searches for “Seneca Paige” or “Seneca Page” in millions of pages of America’s Historical Newspapers, some interesting things turned up.

Paige was everywhere. He showed up first in September 1809, where he was busted in Jersey City after trying to pass a counterfeit note.

He wriggled free in that instance, but was again in the news in April 1812, when a thousand dollar reward for his capture had the desired effect, and Paige was escorted to Baltimore to face charges.

The same key word searches revealed that after being indicted and committed to jail in Baltimore, he made his escape—only to be captured again a year later in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Judging from the news reports, the local authorities weren’t aware that Paige had already escaped from other jails: how could they be? Local law enforcement officials didn’t correspond with one another on a regular basis, and they didn’t have access to every newspaper in the Union. If they had, they might not have been surprised at what happened next: Paige escaped from prison once more, “without breaking any locks or bolts,” as the Commercial Advertiser reported in August 1816.

Paige chose not to push his luck at this point: he apparently relocated to Canada, where he quickly assumed leadership of the so-called “Canada Counterfeiting Company.” And yet news of Paige’s movements continued to drift south of the border, sometimes in court papers, but just as often in the pages of newspapers.

In this particular case, finding Paige required expanding the search, dropping his first name and simply running searches for articles containing both “Paige” or “Page” and “counterfeiter.” When I did this, I found a curious mention of him in a Baltimore newspaper from 1826.

It seems that a man was caught in New Haven with a shipment of counterfeit money concealed in a mahogany dressing case. When examined, he confessed that he had received the bills and the case from “a Mr. Page, in Dunham, Canada.” Dunham was the town where most counterfeit money was manufactured in the 1820s. Again, a serendipitous find, but one that would have been impossible before the advent of digital resources.

America’s Historical Newspapers and other digital resources are extraordinarily powerful tools, enabling historians to reconstruct the movements of fugitives with startling precision. Indeed, with a few keystrokes, a historian working in the 21st century can often reconstruct the movements and careers of obscure criminals two centuries ago with comparable—if not greater—accuracy than the constables and cops who fruitlessly chased them in their own time.

More about the author

Stephen Mihm is the author, with Nouriel Roubini, of Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010) and A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Harvard University Press, 2007). He is also the co-editor, with Katherine Ott and David Serlin, of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU, 2002).

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Announcing a Readex Online Seminar: Newspaper Archives for Academic Research and Teaching

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Readex now offers complimentary 45-minute Webinars led by experts in the history and academic use of newspaper archives. We invite you and your colleagues to register for a lively fall session in which you’ll learn about the fascinating and unique histories of a series of major American newspapers.

We’ll also explore such topics as:

• Why are newspapers often described as not only history’s first draft but also the heart of a community?

• How can general reference and local history researchers best utilize searchable newspaper archives?

• How are teachers at academic institutions of all types and sizes now using newspaper archives in their classrooms?

• How has access to newspaper archives facilitated important published research on American life and history?

• How have the editorial perspectives of individual newspapers changed over time, and how have their political slants shaped and influenced coverage?

• How has news reporting itself developed over time, and how do such transformations mirror evolving social values?

• How can all users more effectively search and enjoy browsing historical newspaper archives?

American newspapers—with their eyewitness reporting, editorials, advertisements, obituaries and human interest stories—have preserved essential records and detailed accounts of nearly every facet of regional and national life. Now searchable online, these regionally diverse archives span centuries of social, cultural, political, military, business, sports and literary history, providing students and scholars with invaluable original reporting and fresh, local-level insights.

Michelle Harper

Our host and key speaker has nearly 15 years of high-level experience with the digitization of archival collections, particularly historical newspapers. She has worked for several leading companies in roles such as Vice President, History Publishing; Director, Special Collections; Director, Product Management; and Publisher, Historical Newspapers.

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Celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month: Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

Thursday, September 15th, 2011
 

Title: Native dance by Spanish-American. Fiesta, Taos, New Mexico. Photographer: Russell Lee (1903-1986). Source: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

National Hispanic Heritage Month—approved by President Lyndon Johnson and expanded in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan—runs from September 15 to October 15. In addition to providing a special opportunity to celebrate Hispanic culture, Hispanic Heritage Month serves to highlight the long and important presence of Hispanic Americans in North America.

Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980 was created to enable researchers at all levels to explore nearly 200 years of Hispanic American history, culture and daily life. This fully searchable online collection features more than 350 titles published in Spanish and bilingually in Spanish and English.  Below is the nameplate and a brief description of 16 key titles found in this renowned resource, created in partnership with the University of Houston and its Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, a national program under the direction of Dr. Nicolás Kanellos. 

El Clamor Público (Los Angeles)
El Clamor Público (The Public Outcry) created landmark awareness of the poor treatment suffered by Hispanics in California. Founded by 17-year-old Francisco P. Ramírez, who turned the Spanish section of the Los Angeles Star into a separate newspaper, El Clamor Público provided a state-wide focus on injustice and oppression.

• Includes 103 issues published between 1855 and 1857

El Cosmopolita (Kansas City)
El Cosmopolita helped Hispanic Americans in the Midwest maintain their relationship with the Spanish-speaking world while simultaneously supplying vital housing and employment information and defending them from exploitation.

• Includes 258 issues published between 1914 and 1919

La Crónica (Laredo)
One of the most influential papers along the U.S.-Mexican border, La Crónica was published and written entirely by Nicasio Idar and his eight children. The paper provided support for the civic and political projects of Hispanic Texans and helped establish Mexican schools in Texas.

• Includes 100 issues published between 1910 and 1914

Demócrata Fronterizo (Laredo)
This Mexican immigrant paper features the writings of Sara Estella Ramírez, a passionate voice for gender and labor issues.

• Includes 81 issues published between 1917 and 1919

El Heraldo de México (Los Angeles)
El Heraldo was hailed as a “people’s newspaper” for its blue-collar profile and focus on immigrant workers.

• Includes 3,129 issues published between 1917 and 1928

Hispano America (San Francisco)
This independent, non-political paper offered immigrants news of their homelands in addition to informing them of the culture and customs of life in the United States. Publisher and editor Julio G. Arce’s syndicated weekly column satirized Hispanic-American culture and helped transform his paper into the most important Hispanic publication in the Bay Area.

• Includes 459 issues published between 1918 and 1931

Latin Times (Chicago)
This post-World War II bilingual title, founded by the children of political refugees, became the voice of a new generation of Hispanic-American citizens.

• Includes 874 issues published between 1958 and 1975

El Misisipi (New Orleans)
In 1808, El Misisipi became the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, starting a tradition of Hispanic American periodicals that soon spread across the country.

• Includes one issue published in 1808

Las Novedades (New York)
In the early 20th century, Las Novedades served the interests of a wide range of Spanish speakers, even while Cuba and Puerto Rico were waging wars of independence against Spain and tensions were high.

• Includes 276 issues published between 1888 and 1918

El Nuevo Mexicano (Santa Fe)
The longest running of the nearly 40 Hispanic newspapers that sprung up in New Mexico in the late 19th century, El Nuevo Mexicano strove to strike a balance between cultural preservation and assimilation.

• Includes 41 issues published between 1890 and 1908

La Prensa (New York)
Adapted to meet the needs of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speaking nationalities that immigrated to New York City in the 20th century, La Prensa became the nation’s longest-running Spanish-language daily.

• Includes 2,196 issues published between 1919 and 1929

La Prensa (San Antonio)
This important 20th-century paper was founded by Ignacio E. Lozano, one of the most powerful political, business and intellectual figures in the Hispanic immigrant community.

• Includes 17,233 issues published between 1913 and 1959

Pueblos Hispanos (New York)
Published by Juan Antonio Corretjer, a Puerto Rican nationalist and an ardent socialist, this significant paper covered politics and culture in the Soviet Union as well as socialist movements in Latin American countries such as Brazil, Peru and Ecuador.

• Includes 77 issues published between 1943 and 1944

Regeneración (Los Angeles)
After the Mexican government prohibited publication of his work, radical journalist Ricardo Flores Magnón emigrated to California and began publishing Regeneración. The paper proved to be one of the most influential advocates for social change in the southwestern United States.

• Includes 253 issues published between 1910 and 1917

La Revista Católica (Las Vegas, New Mexico)
La Revista Católica (The Catholic Magazine) was founded by Italian Jesuit Donato M. Gasparri. The foundation of the Catholic press in New Mexico, La Revista Católica gave the local Mexican community both a voice and the means to parochial education.

• Includes 363 issues published between 1888 and 1895

Traducción Prensa (Tampa)
The only Spanish morning daily in the South in its time, Traducción Prensa advertised itself as an American newspaper published in the Spanish language.

• Includes 15 issues published between 1941 and 1956

Praise for Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980

“Revealing a rich, multi-faceted heritage and transmitting the pulse of regional communities over time and space, these online newspapers will transform our perception of Latino history for generations to come.”

 —Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Ph.D., Historian and Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

To request trial access to Hispanic American Newspapers for your institution, please use this form or contact readexmarketing@readex.com.

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Now online: African American Periodicals – from slavery to the modern era

Monday, September 12th, 2011

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995

The essential new complement to African American Newspapers, 1827-1998

African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 features more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans. Published in 26 states, the publications include academic and political journals, commercial magazines, institutional newsletters, organizations’ bulletins, annual reports and other genres.

These diverse periodicals—which have shaped, and in turn been shaped by, African American culture—will enable new discoveries about lives of African Americans as individuals, as an ethnic group and as Americans. Like African American Newspapers, 1827-1998, this new collection is based upon James P. Danky’s monumental African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography.

Drawn from matchless holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, African American Periodicals ranges over more than 150 years of American life, from slavery during the Antebellum Period to the struggles and triumphs of the modern era. Beyond offering opinions on issues and events of the day, the rare titles in African American Periodicals capture the voices of African American social, political, religious, literary and business history. The publications brought together here—many short-lived and not collected by most libraries—brim with surprises and untold stories.

For more information or to request a collection trial at your institution, please contact Readex at 800.762.8182 or readexmarketing@readex.com.

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Writing the First Biography of Noah Webster in the Digital Age

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

More than America’s greatest lexicographer, Noah Webster (1758-1843) published a supremely influential spelling book, served as confidant of both George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, effectively supported the U.S. Constitution through a widely read essay, edited New York City’s first daily newspaper American Minerva, served as a state representative in both Connecticut and Massachusetts, and helped to found Amherst College.

To bring this “full-bodied human being to life,” award-winning journalist Joshua Kendall, author of The Man Who Made Lists, recently published The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of American Culture (Putnam, 2011). Joseph J. Ellis calls Kendall’s new biography “by far the best, and best written, life of Webster,” and James McGrath Morris says “Kendall single-handily rescues the least-known founder of American politics and culture and gives him his long overdue place of importance.”

In his note on sources used to write The Forgotten Founding Father, Kendall explains:

From America's Historical Newspapers. Click to open full advertisement in PDF.

“I aimed not to write the definitive academic biography but to introduce Noah Webster to the broad reading public, who know him largely as a name pasted onto a reference book. Intrigued by the psychological turmoil which fueled his literary activity, particularly the dictionary, I was interested in bringing the full-bodied human being to life.  To tackle this assignment, I deemed it necessary to peruse as many primary sources as possible, especially since Webster’s descendants had done so much to sculpt his public image….

“I also immersed myself in Webster’s own published words.  As the first Webster biographer of the digital age, I could do much of this reading on my own laptop.  The online resource The Archive of Americana now features scanned copies of most American newspapers between 1690 and 1922.  By searching Webster’s name, I was able to find countless newspaper articles by and about this prolific journalist, including some not mentioned in the six-hundred-page tome A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster, edited by Edwin H. Carpenter (New York, 1958). Likewise, the early American imprints section of the database includes the full text of many of Webster’s books and speeches, such as his various Independence Day orations and his 1806 ‘compend.’”

As Kendall notes, the Archive of Americana provides online access to cohesive collections of historical newspapers and books. This growing family of searchable printed materials, which also includes essential U.S. government publications, puts tens of millions of pages of primary documents at researchers’ fingertips.

For more information about the Archive of Americana, please contact readexmarketing@readex.com or visit our website.

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Posted in American History, American Literature, Announcements, Collection Development, Digital Humanities, Journalism History, Primary Sources in the Classroom, Print Culture, Trends in Database Use | No Comments »

Just Browsing: Cool Items from the Past

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

One of the joys of browsing American historical newspapers is discovering the unexpected from around the world. Take this photograph, for example, of a car being dragged across a Siberian river during the Peking-to-Paris race in 1907:

Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer; Date: Aug. 18, 1907; Page: 29

Or this photo of European ostrich racing in the 1920s:

Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer, Date: Sept. 28, 1924; Page 76

And then this picture of the same race in a different newspaper, which notes that these jockeys couldn’t get their birds to go!

Source: Springfield Republican; Date: Oct. 1, 1924; Page: 18

While you expect to see photos of the stars of stage and screen in the newspapers, this staged image of Elsie Janis is quite amusing.

Source: Boston Journal; Date: Dec. 6, 1906; Page: 7

Source: Farmer's Cabinet; Date: Jan. 31, 1856

Finally, consider this story, reprinted in the Farmer’s Cabinet of Amherst, New Hampshire on January 31, 1856. Credited at the bottom to Bayard Taylor’s Letters, it’s a first-person narrative of the dinnertime entertainment provided to Mr. Taylor and a companion during a “sojourn” in India:

“We were dining together in his bungalow, when a wandering Hindoo minstrel came along with his mandolin, and requested permission to sit upon the verandah and play for us.

“I was desirous of hearing some of the Indian airs, and my host therefore ordered him to perform during dinner. He tuned the wires of his mandolin, extemporized a prelude which had some very familiar passages, and to my complete astonishment began singing “Get out of the way, Old Dan Tucker!” The old man seemed to enjoy my surprise and followed up his performance with “Oh, Susannah,” “Buffalo Gals,” and other choice Ethiopian melodies, all of which he sang with admirable spirit and correctness.”

That’s cultural diffusion!

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