Source material is springing up on the web so quickly that I find I miss important things. Still, how I missed this one is beyond me.
The Chronicling America project at the Library of
Congress is putting American newspapers on-line. The collection so far has clearly been determined by something other than historical significance, but its quirks will be godsends for some historians. There are a host of papers from Arizona, for example, as well as Kentucky. Sadly, there are currently no newspapers from Maine—a pet peeve of mine, since Maine was a pretty crucial state for nineteenth-century politics, and the Kennebec Journal was an important newspaper that tends not to show up in libraries outside of Maine.Anyway, some of these papers may not get much traffic, but there is at least one major draw. The project has put up much of the New York Sun. Edited by Charles A. Dana in the late nineteenth century, this paper was enormously important, but has been quite hard to find, at least on the East Coast.
The website is: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/
It’s worth a look.
