• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, September 1, 2016

Hear ye, hear ye!  If you’re a history nerd (like me) or ever just wanted to explore what it was like to be an American back when saying “OMG” could win you a day in the town stocks being pelted with rotten food, you’re in luck.

This week, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities unveiled a huge expansion of the Chronicling America online database of historic U.S. newspapers.

Previously the database, available at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov, offered access to scanned versions of every issue for hundreds of American newspapers published between 1836, the year of the Alamo, and 1922, when Warren Harding brought the first radio to the White House.

Now, the database extends back even further (and later) to include digitized newspapers published from 1690 to 1963.

The new additions from America’s formative years were published in New York City, Philadelphia and the new capital Washington, D.C., and include the Gazette of the United States, published from 1789-1793; the National Gazette, published from 1791-1793, and the National Intelligencer, published from 1800-1809.

Altogether, the Library of Congress and NEH are adding around 15,000 digitized pages to the Chronicling America database, an open access project that is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.

Early newspapers are an invaluable resource for historians of all stripes. Much of the coverage was devoted to – surprise – politics, and readers may be interested to find that newspapers made no pretense of hiding their partisan affiliations. For example, the Gazette of the United States was basically a mouthpiece for the new Federalist Party, while the National Gazette represented the views of the Democratic-Republicans.

Indeed, in an era before the professionalization of journalism and the enshrinement of “objectivity,” newspapers were primarily political in purpose, a fact still reflected in the names of many older newspapers (e.g. The Springfield Republican and Tallahassee Democrat).

Library of Congress NDNP program manager Deborah Thomas noted that newspapers played more than a mere documentary role. They helped spur participation in the nascent democratic political process: “Following the American Revolution, newspapers contributed to the development of political parties and the national government by documenting speeches, legislation proposals and debates of the day.”