The following is a guest post written by Robin Pike, Head of the Digital Collections Services Section in the Library’s Serial and Government Publications Division.
The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) has reached two major milestones this September: the inclusion of New Hampshire as the 50th state to join the program and making 20 million pages freely available to the public on the Chronicling America website.
Dartmouth College will serve as the New Hampshire state hub, partnering with the New Hampshire State Library, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the University of New Hampshire Library to identify historical newspapers that reflect the state’s political, economic, and cultural history for inclusion in Chronicling America. Among the first newspapers to be digitized and added to the online repository are the New Hampshire Gazette, the first newspaper known to be printed by an enslaved person; The Dartmouth, founded in 1799 as the Dartmouth Gazette, the nation’s oldest school newspaper; and Among the Clouds, a newspaper printed on top of Mount Washington between 1889 and 1917. With these and further additions to Chronicling America’s richness and depth, this online collection provides an ever-increasing representative view of the nation’s history and community voices, helping to fulfill the Library’s mission to engage, inspire and inform all of our users.