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Early American Newspapers

The search for inoculation from the most dreadful diseases that afflict humankind has been relentless for centuries. The history of the American colonies was affected by the decision of George...

The 1880s saw the modern bicycle, with a diamond frame, pneumatic tires, and a chain-driven rear wheel, take shape. Along with their similarly sized wheels, these features made the new machine safer...

March 1865 Liverpool, England. It stood in the center of the stage, at least six feet tall, perched on two-foot-tall supports, with a decorative crown of wood carved vines and fleur-de-lis. To...

The history of Chinese immigration to the United States, from the Gold Rush to World War II, is uniquely the one instance in which American law has specifically barred an entire national or ethnic...

General Ulysses S. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent Grant, enjoyed sharing the following anecdote about their epic voyage around the world. Her story emphasized a key difference between her husband and his...

Like many bank robbers, Cassie Chadwick proffered a note to her victims. Early in her criminal career, when she was just 22 years old, that elegant, imaginative note simply stated that because she was...

The Methodist Episcopal Church was the first and largest denomination to establish the practice of organizing outdoor religious worship. It originated in the wild frontier of Kentucky and quickly...

Early American Newspapers, Series 10, makes hundreds of essential titles from all 50 states searchable for the first time. Included are some of the earliest and rarest newspapers published in each...

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the adult education and social movement known as Chautauqua blossomed in the United States. The original Chautauqua was the concept of a Methodist...

Intrepid souls who ventured out into the blizzard in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 7, 1875 might have encountered a singular apparition: a procession of formally-dressed African-American men...

Ice is a remarkable substance, solid yet transparent, alternately useful and vexatious in cold climates, marvelous in tropical ones, made of water yet it floats. The arrival of ice in Calcutta, India...

It does seem a little like murder to pick off a man as one would a deer, but sharp-shooting in war is one of the “necessities.” The “Near Yorktown” correspondent of the New York Post relates the...

Blame it on a literal reading of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1834, the New Hampshire state legislature granted a charter to found Noyes Academy in the rural Town of Canaan. Because the...

Between early August and early November of 1793 almost ten percent of the population of Philadelphia died after contracting Yellow Fever. At that time Philadelphia was the capital of the young nation...

That there were witches in the olden times is true, else the Bible fights against shadows: for it tells us not once but many times that there were witches. According to printed sources dating to the...

In early 1919 San Francisco was on the brink of a third wave of influenza. On January 10 of that year the San Jose Mercury Herald reported on the increasing number of deaths under the headline, “Masks...

The advent of motion picture industry at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was explosive. The American public was besotted by the astonishing and cheap new entertainment. From the earliest days...

Last night one of the most magnificent atmospheric exhibitions that have ever been witnessed in this latitude took place. A display of the aurora borealis of surpassing extent and beauty occupied the...

You’re traveling to another dimension, north of Rutland, Vermont, to a place not only of sight and sound but of mind, on a journey to what was the epicenter of paranormal activity in 1870s America...

There is a peculiar religious sect in Paris and they worship absinthe. Their shrines are the boulevard cafes; their prayer books the muddy green liquid that cages mental rats within their brains and...

As seen in Part 2 of this series, U.S. newspaper coverage of the Spanish Influenza ended 1918 on a relatively positive note. On New Year’ Eve the San Jose Mercury News reported: The conditions for San...

During the Second Industrial Revolution, Americans were introduced to an array of life-changing products—from the automobile to the lightbulb to the telephone. But 19th-century inventors also designed...

In this issue: Turn-of-the-century black intellectuals challenge a dark pseudo-science; the contentious politics of antislavery in early 20th-century newspapers; and the flash press reveals ordinary...

While the Boston area reeled under the burden of the epidemic, the influenza outbreak was spreading rapidly. On the same date, October 21, 1918, the Belleville News Democrat called the Illinois city...