Today, Readex distributed this news release:

 Readex Significantly Expands Early American Newspapers with Series 12, 1821-1900 

Hundreds of rare short-lived U.S. papers, available online for the first time 

 

September 22, 2015 (NAPLES, FL) — Featuring more than 1,200 19th-century titles collected by the American Antiquarian Society, Early American Newspapers, Series 12, 1821-1900, will be launched in January 2016 by Readex, a division of NewsBank. This searchable chronicle of 19th-century America is by far the largest selection of early U.S. newspapers offered to date, dramatically extending the political, geographical and subject-matter breadth and depth of the Early American Newspapers series.

Designed to meet multidisciplinary research and teaching needs, Series 12 contains journalistic accounts and commentary rich in topics essential to the humanities and social sciences. It also offers an especially rich trove of titles in specific disciplines. For the study of economic and industrial history a large number of agricultural and mercantile titles are included. Campaign newspapers are represented by titles covering all presidential and many important regional campaigns from the Early National Era to Reconstruction. Denominational newspapers provide new insight into religion—the epicenter of nearly everything in the 19th century—and offer unique commentary on such divisive issues as slavery, women’s suffrage and prohibition. In addition, gazettes—known as newspapers of record—are replete with prized statistical data.

“Series 12 provides intimate insight into major transformations and issues that shaped 19th-century American society,” said Jim Draper, Executive Vice President, Readex. “The collection not only presents vital new coverage of local, regional and national history, culture and daily life, but also critical facets of U.S. business, politics and religion.”

Key titles include Mercantile Gazette and Prices Current (San Francisco, CA), Grand Valley Star (Grand Junction, CO), Daily Globe (Washington, DC), Ka Elele Hawaii (Honolulu, HI), Dubuque Daily Times (Dubuque, IA), New Orleans Republican (New Orleans, LA), The Reformer and Campaign Times (Boston, MA), Maine Farmer (Augusta, ME), Western Episcopalian (Gambier, OH), The Spirit of ’76 (Nashville, TN), Wisconsin Daily Patriot (Madison, WI), The Journal (Tacoma, WA) and many others.

“As the nation’s chief repository for early American newspapers, the American Antiquarian Society is proud of our long-standing partnership with Readex to make newspapers more readily available to researchers worldwide,” says Ellen S. Dunlap, President of the American Antiquarian Society. “Early American Newspapers, Series 12, exemplifies our enduring effort to add newly discovered titles and editions to this expanding Readex series.”

Early American Newspapers, Series 12, shares a common interface with all other America’s Historical Newspapers collections, enabling seamless searching with African American Newspapers, Hispanic American Newspapers, Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection, Caribbean Newspapers and all previous series of Early American Newspapers.

About the American Antiquarian Society
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is both a learned society and a major independent research library. The AAS library houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, sheet music, and graphic arts material printed from first contact through 1876 in what is now the United States, Canada, and the West Indies. The AAS collections also contain manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary works, bibliographies, and other reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century. The library contains more than two-thirds of all known imprints created in America before 1821, making it the single greatest repository of such materials in the world. Additionally, the Society’s holdings of American printed materials dating from 1821 through 1876 are among the strongest anywhere.

About Readex, a division of NewsBank
For more than 60 years, the Readex name has been synonymous with research in historical materials and government documents. Recognized by librarians, students, and scholars for its efforts to transform academic scholarship, Readex offers a wealth of Web-based collections in the humanities and social sciences, including the Archive of Americana, a family of historical collections featuring searchable books, pamphlets, newspapers, and government documents printed in America over three centuries, and the World Newspaper Archive, created in partnership with the Center for Research Libraries. Also available are the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports and the Joint Publications Research Service Reports, two of the U.S. government’s fundamental sources of foreign intelligence gathered from publicly available media during the second half of the 20th century.