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Category: Digitized Newspapers

Play (Congressional) Ball!

Posted by: Heather Thomas

This is a guest post by Michelle Strizever, photography and digital content specialist in the Office of Art and Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives, and contains information from An Annual Outing: The Congressional Baseball Game. What began as a casual game among colleagues has evolved into one of Congress’s most anticipated annual pastimes. …

A child carrying a bundle of newspapers in one hand, the other arm held high with a copy of the Anchorage Daily Times, the headline reading

Walt Whitman: A Life in Newspapers

Posted by: Arlene Balkansky

In 1860, the 3rd edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass received a wildly varying reception in newspapers. At opposite ends of the spectrum, it was advertised as “America’s First Distinctive Poem” and reviewed as “armless, witless, pointless.”                       The advertisement was from the volume’s …

A child carrying a bundle of newspapers in one hand, the other arm held high with a copy of the Anchorage Daily Times, the headline reading

Chronicling America: 15 million and counting!

Posted by: Megan Halsband

This is a guest post by Nathan Yarasavage, a digital projects specialist in the Serial and Government Publications Division. This week we celebrate an exciting milestone. Chronicling America, the online searchable database of historic U.S. newspapers, now includes more than 15 million pages! Since 2005, libraries, historical societies, and other institutions throughout the country have …

A child carrying a bundle of newspapers in one hand, the other arm held high with a copy of the Anchorage Daily Times, the headline reading

Champion Cyclist “Major” Taylor

Posted by: Amber Paranick

Cyclist Marshall W. “Major” Taylor was the fastest man on earth.  He won thousands of dollars as a bicycle racer and became the most famous African-American in the United States. This was the golden age of cycling, and bicycle racing was a premier sporting event. Thousands of fans packed indoor velodromes to watch races and many …

The Animals of Aeronautics

Posted by: Heather Thomas

Monkeys and woodchucks and cats, oh my! Discover all the critters great and small who made their contribution to the history of aeronautics. A gray tabby named Kiddo was the first cat to attempt to cross the Atlantic in 1910. The cat stowed away in a lifeboat on the airship America before takeoff, leading to the …

The Kidnapping of Little Charley Ross

Posted by: Heather Thomas

Don’t take candy from strangers. Little Charley Ross, the first missing child to make national headlines, made that mistake. During the summer of 1874, two men in a horse-drawn buggy pulled into an affluent neighborhood in Philadelphia and befriended two little boys who were playing in front of their stately home. For five days in …

The Bones of Thomas Paine

Posted by: Heather Thomas

They dug up the body in the dead of night. Men armed with shovels and pickaxes extracted the coffin and fled into the October darkness. Authorities gave chase until the body snatchers’ wagon raced over King’s Bridge and into Manhattan. Thus began the saga of the remains of Thomas Paine. At the end of the …

A child carrying a bundle of newspapers in one hand, the other arm held high with a copy of the Anchorage Daily Times, the headline reading

Gladys Pyle: American Trailblazer & “Ultra Modern” Woman

Posted by: Megan Halsband

This is a guest post by Valerie Haeder, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division. South Dakota’s Gladys Pyle was the first woman elected to the South Dakota House and South Dakota’s first female U.S. Senator.  But she wouldn’t have cared about such distinctions as much as she did about getting things …