Library of Congress Chronicling America

United States United States Archives and Libraries  Library of Congress  Library of Congress Chronicling America

Overview
The Chronicling America, National Historical Newspapers project was commissioned to locate and preserve copies of newspapers published over the years in the towns, counties, and states of America dating back to 1690. The site presently contain almost 5 million pages of digitized newspapers and an index to virtually all of the newspapers published in America.

Description of the Website
Chronicling America, National Historic Newspapers 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 (LOC).

The Project 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. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress and on the Library of Congress website. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

Organization of the Site
The website has two major components: a digital database of digitized images of individual newspapers and an index of the existing copies of newspapers maintained by repositories throughout the U.S.

The Newspaper Digital Database
The number of scanned images of newspapers from throughout the United States is steadily growing and presently includes almost 5 million images. The earliest coverage begins in 1836 and has yet to include all of the U.S. states. But content is increasing rapidly and additional states are being added in due course. All of the pages of the digital database are searchable by individual words or the names of individuals.

In the basic search you can choose to search the entire archive or choose a state and/or a time period.