Historic Newspapers (Library of Congress Flickr pilot project)

The Library of Congress invites you to explore ‘history’s first draft’ by looking at illustrated pages in old newspapers selected from our online collections. We welcome your tags and comments. There’s so much more to discover in yesteryear’s news!

By way of background, the Library of Congress, in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities, is working with many partners in the U.S. to provide access to digital copies of American newspapers through the National Digital Newspaper Program. These newspapers are usually digitized from microfilm with basic structural information that helps us put them online in a freely accessible way.

The National Digital Newspaper Program currently provides access to more than 1 million newspapers pages, published in 17 states and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1922. These newspapers are selected by libraries to represent their state’s history in the national collection. You can read and search the pages, and discover much more about historic newspapers in the Chronicling America collection at the Library of Congress Web site. You might also enjoy the special presentations of newspapers that appear in American Memory and Exhibitions.

For more information or to ask a question about these newspapers in Flickr, please visit the National Digital Newspaper Program Web site or the Newspapers and Current Periodicals Reading Room Web site at the Library of Congress.