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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 …
Posted in: Crime, Digitized Newspapers, Mystery, Newspapers
Posted by: Amber Paranick
A digital collection called The General News on the Internet, a free archive of online-only news sites collected from the web, is now available. The Library of Congress began preserving these sites in June 2014. How are these news-based sites captured? The Library uses a hybrid approach of weekly captures of the websites, augmented with …
Posted in: Newspapers, Web Archives
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 …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Mystery, Newspapers
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 …
Posted in: Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Women's History
Posted by: Arlene Balkansky
Catherine Wolfe Donohue is not a well-known name, but in the late 1930s newspapers featured her as she lay dying. She was among the women who painted luminous numbers on watch, clock, and instrument dials using radium-laced paint in factories in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut. Dubbed “Radium Girls” and “Living Dead,” they suffered radium …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Women's History
Posted by: Amber Paranick
This Friday, March 8, 2019, is International Women’s Day and today we return to our historical newspaper archives for stories featuring change-making women in newspapers searchable in Chronicling America, the Library’s freely available database that provides access to historic United States newspapers published between 1789 and 1963. As the Library’s digital collection grows to 15 …
Posted in: Biography, Newspapers, Women's History
Posted by: Heather Thomas
Sissieretta Jones sang for kings, presidents, and to audiences around the world, becoming the highest paid African-American entertainer of the late 19th century. She headlined at Carnegie Hall and was hailed as one of the greatest sopranos of her time, yet she never performed on the operatic stage. She was born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner in …
Posted in: African American History, Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Women's History
Posted by: Arlene Balkansky
This is a guest post by Valerie Haeder, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division. A handful of presidents are remembered for their greatness, but most are relegated to the footnotes of history. Even fewer vice presidents have achieved fame and favor, with one—Vice President John Nance Garner who served under Franklin …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers
Posted by: Arlene Balkansky
One hundred years ago, on February 17, 1919, the African-American 369th Infantry Regiment, popularly known as the Harlem Hell Fighters, marched up Fifth Avenue into Harlem in a massive victory parade in their honor. “Hell Fighters” was the nickname the German enemy gave the 369th and the name stuck for good reason. They were among the …
Posted in: African American History, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, World War I