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Archive of Americana

Virtually every aspect of U.S. history, culture and daily life across three centuries
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The acclaimed Archive of Americana enables students and scholars to explore virtually every aspect of United States history, culture and daily life across three centuries. Providing unprecedented online access to newspapers, books, broadsides, ephemera, government publications and more, the Archive of Americana puts tens of millions of pages of primary documents at researchers' fingertips. Allowing cross-collection searching, Archive of Americana collections offer fully searchable facsimile images, superior authority-based indexing, bibliographic records and PDFs that can be quickly downloaded and printed.

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Collections in this product family
  • Essential primary sources for exploring the people, places, and events that shaped the nation
  • Thousands of rare historical American newspapers offering a rich chronicle of daily life in America
  • Curated into collections to provide a broad range of historical, regional, and political perspectives from 1690 to the early 20th century
AHN-Monitor-hk
America's Historical Newspapers

“Readex’s Web-based America’s Historical Newspapers (c. 2004– ) offers a vast and ever growing digitized collection of American newspapers from 1690 to the present, and I draw the material for this article from Readex’s online database.”
— Susan Schibanoff, Professor Emerita of English and Gender Studies, University of New Hampshire, in Appalachia (2021)

“Readex has recently added five specialized collections to America’s Historical Newspapers….Together, these five new collections span every U.S. region, focusing primarily on the 19th century and areas such as business, gazettes, politics and religion….these five collections are exceptional additions to America’s Historical Newspapers and are highly recommended for academic libraries seeking to expand their primary source coverage in history.  In particular, for libraries whose patrons’ historical research needs intersect with agriculture, business, political science, or religion, these resources provide access to materials not easily found elsewhere.”
— Brian Sullivan, Information Literacy Librarian, Alfred University, in Library Journal (June 1, 2016)

“The Early American Newspapers collection contains over 2,000 newspapers of historical importance, both at the national and the local level, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, New York Herald, Boston Herald and Times-Picayune. Each series in the collection covers a different time span, and series can be selected individually or in combination to build a collection best suited to the needs of each institution’s users….Early American Newspapers uses the America’s Historical Newspapers interface, which makes it simple to search or browse….The simple search interface should make this database user-friendly for undergraduate researchers, while the thoughtful filtering options, as well as the sheer scope of the collection, will be a boon for more advanced researchers, such as graduate students and faculty.”
— Lindley Homol, Reference and Instruction Librarian, University of Maryland University College Library, in Reference Reviews (Vol. 29, No. 2, 2015)

“Readex publishes respected subscription databases of full-text historical newspapers. Its America's Historical Newspapers collects and digitizes American newspapers; offerings include Early American Newspapers, which has recently released four additional series—series 6 (1741-1922), series 7 (1773-1922), series 8 (1844-1922), and series 9 (1832-1922). This collective addition adds 290 newspaper titles and over 4,300,000 pages to Early American Newspapers (series 1, CH, Apr'06, 43-4401; series 4 and 5, CH, Dec'12, 50-1798), bringing the complete collection to a substantial compilation of 2,000-plus newspaper titles from all 50 states, published between 1690 and 1922. Titles include valuable sources such as some 8,000 additional issues from New Orleans's Times-Picayune and some 15,000 issues from The Oregonian, now Oregon's largest newspaper. Other remarkable titles are Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and New York's The Daily Graphic--both heavily illustrated with hand-drawn graphics, making them a researcher's treasure. The complete list of additions is rich with titles of national and local importance.

“Libraries may purchase the entire collection or choose series, decades, or eras, in order to reflect a library's research needs. Readex's newspaper searching has a number of features that encourage precision and better results. The single search line can be expanded into a multiple-line search engine to better focus a complex research topic. Users may also narrow results by date, article type, language, state, and individual newspaper titles. The results present a small window of select information, with search terms in boldface for quick reading. Though other newspaper databases are available, the America's Historical Newspapers project is unique in the numbers of newspaper titles included, the number of individual issues included, and the inclusion of small local newspapers. Early American Newspapers is a real research gem for historians, all levels of college students, and genealogists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.”
— C. W. Bruns, California State University-Fullerton, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 6-9, in Choice (July 2014)

"Readex has launched a new subscription-based Web site, America’s Historical Newspapers, that enables users to travel through time and call up issues of various newspapers to conduct, for example, a thorough study of the Civil War in the 1860s, analyze the stock market as it soared in the 1920s, or track the slugger Mickey Mantle’s baseball career throughout the 1950s. Using a simple search function, users can bring to life on their monitors the pages of an old newspaper from any major American city—and some small towns—and read about whatever person or event they choose.

"For example, one can call up any number of colonial-era newspapers to track the beginnings of the American Revolution in 1775 or search twentieth-century publications to investigate the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The newspapers provide graphic accounts of history’s disasters and joyous stories of its triumphs. Do you want to know what the American people thought about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” declaration? Look it up and read how ten different newspapers covered his first inaugural address in 1933. How electrifying was the 1927 baseball World Series? Call it up and read about it, game by game and inning by inning.

"The site allows users to race back in time, seeing how newspapers covered real drama. I went to the October 27, 1881, edition of the Tombstone Epitaph to read its account of the fabled gunfight at the O.K. Corral involving the legendary marshal Wyatt Earp. The lengthy, colorful story about the high noon shoot-out in Tombstone was just as melodramatic and colorful as the movies that depicted the battle. Happily, the story included a historical note not presented on film: that hundreds of men working in the Tombstone silver mines piled out of the mine shafts, 'like an invading army,' as the reporter wrote, when they heard news of the gun battle. Users can also access a national list of newspapers—organized by state—and compare how a paper in San Francisco covered the story with its treatment in a Boston publication....

"Overall, America’s Historical Newspapers is a fabulous tool for research. The new world of electronics and gadgetry may infuriate us (turn those cell phones off!) but here, in this Internet collection of historical newspapers, it is a wonder. I am researching a book on the Civil War and was able to call up dozens of 1860s newspapers. Full of vivid and stark accounts of the conflict, the newspapers provide the first draft of history, as they say—and a colorful one.

"The site will be extraordinarily helpful to scholars doing historical research, and it will also be rewarding for college and high school history teachers and students who want to use old newspapers as part of their study of the American story. Anyone with an Internet connection and wanderlust who wants to do a little journalistic time traveling can go to this site and come face to face with presidents, Oscar winners, Wall Street titans, and leaders of the women’s movement.

"And, as the American newspaper industry continues to shrink, it is always nice to go back in time and see it in its hearty majesty." 
—Bruce Chadwick, Professor of History, Rutgers University in Journal of American History (September 2010)

“Composite Score: 4.75 Stars (out of 5)....The initial search screen makes it very clear which searching options are available. One can immediately start searching using the Google-like search box and the drop-down menu of searching options, including Headline, Standard Title (i.e., publication title), and Title as published....The results list includes a wealth of information for each item, including title of publication; publication date; published as; location; headline, and article type....The results list also includes a thumbnail image (actually larger than a thumbnail) of a portion of the article. This facilitates research by making it easy to browse through and eliminate irrelevant items....

“Compared to other databases that sometimes make it difficult to find a list of titles included, this one gives you a list that is straightforward, easy to find, and includes useful details such as language, number of issues included, and start/end dates. The ability to sort the list by various categories is useful....The list of titles included is impressive. The publications list indicates details of what is included in each title, including name changes, etc. The fact that all titles are full-image enhances the use of the database for research.” 
—Janice G. Schuster, Phillips Memorial Library, Providence College inThe Charleston Advisor (April 2010)

"A truly expansive archive of nearly 2,000 newspaper titles culled from all fifty states. At the time of this review, the fully searchable collection consists of three primary divisions, which together canvass the course of American history from 1690 to 1998. The first and largest of the three divisions, Early American Newspapers, is organized into seven series ranging from 1690–1922. Each series covers a range of years and geographic regions, which roughly expand in scope in conjunction with the geographic growth of the United States. A second division,African American Newspapers, 1827–1998, offers coverage of more than 170 years of African American history as recorded in 270 newspapers representing thirty-five states. The collection includes numerous historically significant titles, such as Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in American history, which was published in New York City from 1827–29. The third and final division, Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808–1980, is a by-product of the ‘Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project,’ a national program to locate, collect, and make available the written contributions of Hispanic Americans from the colonial period to the present. The collection includes hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including Spanish language and English titles printed in the United States." 
—Daniel P. Barr, Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Winter 2010)

"Scholars and students of journalism history will find a rich resource of primary sources in Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922. The extensive database provides Web access to an expanding compilation of digitized newspapers published during 200-plus years….With the 2007 edition of series 4 and 5, the database numbers nearly 2,000 titles of full-text newspapers representing all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The collection contains an extensive array of papers, ranging from early colonial publications to regional weekly and metropolitan daily newspapers to the specialized press."
—Aleen Ratzalaff, Tabor College in Journalism History (Spring 2008)

"Best of Reference 2007... 'You want a primary source from when?' One-stop shopping for full-text digital images from more than a thousand U.S. newspapers published from 1690 to 1922. Zoom in and out of particular time periods with a score of handy limit options."
—Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library (May 2007)

"Most Improved Product....exploding with new content, a much improved user interface..."
—The Charleston Advisor (October 2006)

“Readex has long been the name associated with collecting and preserving documents that define and describe the country’s early heritage. Early American Newspapers (EAN), with bibliographic and full-image access to nearly two centuries’ worth of local papers (from 23 East Coast and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia), represents one of the major components of its ‘Archive of Americana’ suite of digital collections….

“It’s as if the contents of hundreds of historical societies all across America were put on display, and a glance at the list of titles-from the Cahawba Press and Alabama Intelligencer (Cahawba, AL) to The Bee (Hudson, NY) to the lone issue of People’s Friend (Danville, KY)-should be enough to give scholars and historians a serious case of goose bumps….

“Institutions acquiring multiple Archive collections receive a discount; those that own the microform receive an additional discount-an approach we warmly applaud….

EAN's content possesses a local flavor that the other resources reviewed here cannot come close to matching.”
—Gail Golderman and Bruce Connolly, Union College in Library Journal-supplement Net Connect (Fall 2005)


"...Rapid access to newspapers spanning centuries. ... Researchers in academic, public and historical libraries will save time with this resource. … Early American Newspapers, Series I is the researcher's choice to complement Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Early American Imprint Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819."
—Jetta Carol Culpepper, Special Programs Librarian, Murray State University Libraries and the College of Education in Reference Reviews(November 2005)


"Early American Newspapers is a digitized, full image, completely searchable electronic database of newspapers that chronicle the rich and intriguing history of the United States' early years. The collection focuses on titles published in the 18th century but includes material from 1690 through 1876. This substantial database includes 617 newspaper titles, though many of the titles are far from complete. It features 1,344,099 pages as of 2005, with more to be added. The newspapers are primarily from a collection owned by the American Antiquarian Society. Series I includes newspapers from 23 eastern states and the District of Columbia. Series 2 and Series 3, covering other parts of the country, have recently been released.

“Researchers who remember working with clunky microfilm, with all its limitations, will be ecstatic about this product's ease of use and dynamic search capabilities. The search engine is highly intuitive.

“It is possible to combine Boolean operators in both simple and advanced searches and to limit to categories as varied as elections, legislation, poetry, letters, shipping news, and advertisements. Genealogical researchers will enjoy being able to limit searches to death or matrimony notices. Especially valuable with this type of database is the capability of dealing with the variant spellings so common in early American primary materials. The digitized images vary in quality but tend to be amazingly good, given that they are copies of deteriorating newsprint. This unique source of primary materials will be of great interest to larger public libraries and to academic libraries within the geographic areas covered. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers.”
—C. W. Bruns, California State University-Fullerton in Choice (April 2006)

“Readex has recently released Series 4 and 5 of this database, adding 268 newspaper titles and over 2,700,000 pages, all of which are available for full-text searching. These additional pages bring the current version of Early American Newspapers to over 1,000 historical newspaper titles with almost 9 million pages. Series 4 and 5 consist of newspapers from all 50 states and many diverse categories....Each additional release is a real bonanza to researchers....The Early American Newspapers database is unique among the many digitized newspaper collections for its size and for the inclusion of local newspapers; it is a functional database of real depth. 

 

“Searching newspaper databases can be laborious, but Readex's features assist users in quickly locating the articles they need....These features are immensely useful when evaluating results. The Series 4 and 5, 1756-1922 component is the latest addition to an exciting product and a valuable tool for historians and students in a wide variety of fields...Summing Up: Highly recommended...”

 

— C. W. Bruns, California State University, Fullerton, in Choice (Dec. 2012)

Users can bring to life on their monitors the pages of an old newspaper from any major American city—and some small towns—and read about whatever person or event they choose.
Bruce Chadwick, Professor of History, Rutgers University, in Journal of American History (Sept. 2010)
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These newspapers...embrace over two hundred years of the American experience. In them we find many small but essential details...
James M. Bergquist, Emeritus Professor of History, Villanova University
  • The world’s most comprehensive collection of its kind
  • 350+ newspapers provide an incomparable record of African American history, culture, and daily life
  • Coverage of life in the Antebellum South, growth of the Black church, the Jim Crow Era, the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, political and economic empowerment and more
AAN-Monitor

“Readex recently expanded their African American Newspapers, 1827-1998, Series 1collection with 75 additional titles, to now tally more than 350 newspapers. Editor Danky, who compiled African-American Newspapers and Periodicals selected materials for this newly released Series 2.…The content is significant, and researchers will appreciate having access to such a large collection of primary sources….researchers seeking historical African American perspectives from the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries will certainly appreciate the breadth of this collection.”
— L. Stern, SUNY Cortland, in Choice (April 2017)

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1827-1998, provides online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the black American experience.  Researchers will find firsthand perspectives on notable Americans from Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as obituaries, advertisements, editorials and illustrations. The collection includes historically significant papers from more than 35 states including rare 19th-century titles published by or for black Americans, digitized for convenient browsing and searching.”
— “Newsprint in Black” in Library Journal (Oct. 15. 2016)

“The library’s new African American Newspaper database has proven to be a beneficial tool for graduate student Sarah Patterson, whose research focuses on African American women in print culture. The university library acquired online access this summer to an extensive database that will be used for graduate research and by several classes according to library officials. Patterson said she started a petition for the library to acquire the collection, which was signed by over 90 students, professors and administrators. She said English professor Pier Gabrielle Foreman was in support of the university obtaining the collection and she plans to use the database in several of her classes. The new opportunity excited Foreman. She said for many years, African American political, cultural and economic activities were not viewed by mainstream print and academic institutions … Patterson said the newspapers are great for research but could also teach students a lot about the African American experience.”
— UD Review, the University of Delaware’s independent student newspaper

“A collection of the full text and indexing for more than 270 19th- and 20th-century U.S. newspapers from 37 states (plus the District of Columbia) published by and for African Americans … The subject matter encompasses ethnic studies, cultural studies, literature, social history and political studies from the Antebellum South to the civil rights movement and beyond …

“This extraordinary content—both deep and broad—is the main reason to acquire the file. It’s a treasure trove of African American culture and history. But the power of the search and display system also delivers that content beautifully …

“Verdict: Enthusiastically recommended for public and academic libraries serving serious researchers in African American studies and American history.”
— Cheryl LaGuardia, Harvard University, in Library Journal (May 1, 2012) 

“The early black press served a unique purpose, articulating the social and political aspirations of African Americans in their own words. Although many of these publications were short lived, lasting only a few years or months, they reveal a point of view not often communicated by the mainstream press.

“In the past, librarians aiding scholars in identifying black newspapers and periodicals were often limited to consulting bibliographies, but now librarians can direct scholars to digital full text versions of these critical primary resources. African American Newspapers, 1827-1998, a Readex database released in 2009, provides access to over 200 black newspapers. Readex should be commended for including James Danky as the Senior Advisor for African American Newspapers 1827-1998 and making selections based on Danky’s seminal bibliography African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography(Danky and Hady, 1998). This bibliography is a trusted reference source for librarians, archivist and historians. It is to date the most comprehensive bibliography documenting over 6,500 rare and prominent African American newspapers and periodicals published in the U.S. …

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 adds to the current selection of historical newspaper databases available, filling an important gap for libraries … The search interface, functionality and layout for African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 is identical to Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers, accommodating both simple and complex searching … African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 is a worthy investment for libraries supporting traditional disciplines like history or political science and interdisciplinary fields such as African American, ethnic and women’s studies programs … libraries should consider a subscription to this Readex database to provide the broadest access to 19th and 20th century African American newspapers.”
—Carmelita N. Pickett, Texas A&M University, in Reference Reviews (Vol. 26, No. 3. 2012)

“As part of Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers collection, African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 provides full-text access to 270 historically significant African-American newspapers from across the US. The collection content is drawn from the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress. With the selections guided by James Danky, editor of African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (CH, Feb'00, 37-3082), students and faculty will discover firsthand reports of major events and issues such as the Civil War, presidential elections, business and trade, the arts and religion. Influential publications include The Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, OH), The New York Age (New York, NY), L'Union (New Orleans, LA), and The Washington Bee (Washington, DC). Addition of Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans, was under way as this review went to press.

“Researchers can access newspapers in a variety of ways. Search features are straightforward. In addition to searching a newspaper’s full text, headline or title, researchers may select newspapers from a region on a map or from a list of state names. Those seeking articles relevant to a particular time period may choose an era, e.g., the Roaring Twenties (1921-28), or a presidential era, e.g., Abraham Lincoln (1861-65). Researchers may also limit their search to an array of primary resources including letters, advertisements, and a variety of announcements. Covering more than a century and a half, this collection offers unique perspectives and rich historical context surrounding the African American experience. Summing up: highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals; general readers.”
— L. A. Ganster, University of Pittsburgh, in Choice (January 2011)

AAN
1827-1998

James Danky, Senior Advisor
Editor, African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography, and Project Director, Newspapers and Periodicals of the African Diaspora
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kathleen E. Bethel 
African American Studies Librarian
Northwestern University

David W. Blight 
Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Yale University

Randall K. Burkett 
Curator of African American Collections
Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
Emory University

Graham Hodges
George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies
Colgate University

William P. Jones 
Professor
University of Minnesota

Patrick D. Jones 
Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

“Already one of the most significant digitized collections of Black print in existence, Readex’s African American Newspapers will become with this expansion an essential resource for anyone interested in American literature, culture, and history.  Just to cite two examples: adding the Pacific Appeal to its run of the San Francisco Elevator will make African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, the strongest resource available on the early Black West, and adding the Anglo-African, Pine and Palm, and the New Era to the New Orleans Tribune will give this collection an unparalleled store of material on African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction.  I’d like everyone to read, explore, and learn from African American Newspapers, Series 1 and 2.
—Eric Gardner, Professor of English, Saginaw Valley State University, and author of Black Print Unbound (Oxford, 2015)

“As Carol Polsgrave has observed, African American periodicals constitute an ‘alternative public sphere’ that serves as ‘a base from which politically marginal groups challenge the power of the mainstream public sphere to define reality.’ Many African American newspapers survived for only a single issue, while others have lasted for more than a century. Regardless of length of publication, these often fugitive newspapers preserve a critically important documentation of American life, politics, art, and culture.”
—Randall K. Burkett, Research Curator for African American Collections, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Collection, Emory University

 “The expansion of African American Newspapers comes at a time when scholars are rediscovering the richness of this rare primary source material. The addition of several crucial titles, from the early 19th to the late 20th century, will not only enrich scholarship on African American activism and political organization, but also offer new insight into the more everyday aspects of black life, culture, and expression across two centuries. The historical span of the collection, its broad geographic scope, and the inclusion of non-English language papers will prove immensely helpful for scholarship and teaching in African American history, culture, literature, and related fields.”
—Britt Rusert, Assistant Professor, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

African American Newspapers is interdisciplinary by nature and will continue the growth of the digital humanities effort at the University of Delaware. Thank you to the many persons at the University of Delaware who were so interested in and advocated for this new e-resource.”
— Susan Brynteson, Vice Provost and May Morris Director of Libraries, University of Delaware

“Rowan’s history scholars requested this in-depth look at African American history for undergraduate education and research. FoCaL supports academic material requests that cannot be met by the library’s limited budget, and this purchase [African American Newspapers, 1827-1998] is a valuable addition to its archival newspaper collection.”
— Razelle Frankl, Chair of Friends of Campbell Library (FoCaL), Rowan University on library blog

“Some days I wonder why it took so long for there to be an online, full image, easily searchable database that covers 270+ African American newspapers, representing more than 150 years of the African American experience. I still hug the computer monitor and say, ‘Thank you, Readex, for taking the lead and providing African American Newspapers, 1827-1998.’ I love this collection! It has revolutionized the way I research entries for the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA). I thank you, and thousands of NKAA users thank you.”
— Reinette F. Jones, Librarian, Louis B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky

“By providing easy access to early African American newspapers, Readex makes a timely and constructive contribution to the advancement of research with primary documents. It is a common mistake to conclude that students usually find primary sources, such as these newspapers, difficult to interpret, dull and too challenging to read. On the contrary, these news accounts—unconsciously molded by the spirit of the time in which they were written—are often vivid, entertaining and highly informative.

“There is so much to be learned from a study of original accounts that no teacher should be content with second-hand descriptions when this Readex archive is available. African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 can help raise the quality of historical investigation, and I look forward to including this resource in my work with students both here and abroad.”
— Angela Keiser, National Board Member, UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project, (TST-USA)

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Covering African Americans, Hispanic Americans and other ethnic groups
  • The single most comprehensive online resource for searching and browsing early American newspapers
  • Thousands of fully searchable historical newspapers from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
  • Flexible ways to meet collection needs: by series, by place of publication, by era or by decade
AHN-Monitor
Early American Newspapers

Readex, a division of NewsBank, has been publishing primary research materials for over 60 years and has partnered with the American Antiquarian Society for almost that long. The latest collaborative effort has resulted in the release of Series 10, 1730-1900 and Series 11, 1803-1899 in its Early American Newspapers collection...Series 10 adds more than 440 new titles, including Ben Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette and many major political organs of their time, such as the National Intelligencer and The Chicago RepublicanSeries 11 adds 130 titles, including those such as the New York Herald, New York World, Cherokee Advocate, and the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin....

"Readex's expanding collection of historical US newspapers offers excellent breadth and depth—an unparalleled resource for all who pursue historical research in a great range of academic disciplines, as well as journalists, teachers, and genealogists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic audiences; professionals/practitioners; general readers."
— J. A. Knapp, Penn State University, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 10 and 11, in Choice (Dec. 2015)

 

“The Early American Newspapers collection contains over 2,000 newspapers of historical importance, both at the national and the local level, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, New York Herald, Boston Herald and Times-Picayune. Each series in the collection covers a different time span, and series can be selected individually or in combination to build a collection best suited to the needs of each institution’s users….Early American Newspapers uses the America’s Historical Newspapers interface, which makes it simple to search or browse….The simple search interface should make this database user-friendly for undergraduate researchers, while the thoughtful filtering options, as well as the sheer scope of the collection, will be a boon for more advanced researchers, such as graduate students and faculty.”
— Lindley Homol, Reference and Instruction Librarian, University of Maryland University College Library, in Reference Reviews (Vol. 29, No. 2, 2015)

 

“Readex publishes respected subscription databases of full-text historical newspapers. Its America's Historical Newspapers collects and digitizes American newspapers; offerings include Early American Newspapers, which has recently released four additional series—series 6 (1741-1922), series 7 (1773-1922), series 8 (1844-1922), and series 9 (1832-1922). This collective addition adds 290 newspaper titles and over 4,300,000 pages to Early American Newspapers (series 1, CH, Apr'06, 43-4401; series 4 and 5, CH, Dec'12, 50-1798), bringing the complete collection to a substantial compilation of 2,000-plus newspaper titles from all 50 states, published between 1690 and 1922. Titles include valuable sources such as some 8,000 additional issues from New Orleans's Times-Picayune and some 15,000 issues from The Oregonian, now Oregon's largest newspaper. Other remarkable titles are Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and New York's The Daily Graphic--both heavily illustrated with hand-drawn graphics, making them a researcher's treasure. The complete list of additions is rich with titles of national and local importance.

“Libraries may purchase the entire collection or choose series, decades, or eras, in order to reflect a library's research needs. Readex's newspaper searching has a number of features that encourage precision and better results. The single search line can be expanded into a multiple-line search engine to better focus a complex research topic. Users may also narrow results by date, article type, language, state, and individual newspaper titles. The results present a small window of select information, with search terms in boldface for quick reading. Though other newspaper databases are available, the America's Historical Newspapers project is unique in the numbers of newspaper titles included, the number of individual issues included, and the inclusion of small local newspapers. Early American Newspapers is a real research gem for historians, all levels of college students, and genealogists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.”
— C. W. Bruns, California State University-Fullerton, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 6-9, in Choice (July 2014)

 

  • The single most comprehensive online source of early American newspapers
  • Chronicles the evolution of American history, culture and daily life from 1690 to 1922
  • An unparalleled record of the people, issues and events that shaped America
AHN monitor
Early American Newspapers

“Readex, a division of NewsBank, has been publishing primary research materials for over 60 years and has partnered with the American Antiquarian Society for almost that long. The latest collaborative effort has resulted in the release of Series 10, 1730-1900 and Series 11, 1803-1899 in its Early American Newspapers collection…Series 10 adds more than 440 new titles, including Ben Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette and many major political organs of their time, such as the National Intelligencer and The Chicago RepublicanSeries 11 adds 130 titles, including those such as the New York Herald, New York World, Cherokee Advocate, and the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin….

“Readex's expanding collection of historical US newspapers offers excellent breadth and depth—an unparalleled resource for all who pursue historical research in a great range of academic disciplines, as well as journalists, teachers, and genealogists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic audiences; professionals/practitioners; general readers.”
— J. A. Knapp, Penn State University, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 10 and 11, in Choice (Dec. 2015)

“The Early American Newspapers collection contains over 2,000 newspapers of historical importance, both at the national and the local level, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, New York Herald, Boston Herald and Times-Picayune. Each series in the collection covers a different time span, and series can be selected individually or in combination to build a collection best suited to the needs of each institution’s users….Early American Newspapersuses the America’s Historical Newspapers interface, which makes it simple to search or browse….The simple search interface should make this database user-friendly for undergraduate researchers, while the thoughtful filtering options, as well as the sheer scope of the collection, will be a boon for more advanced researchers, such as graduate students and faculty.”
— Lindley Homol, Reference and Instruction Librarian, University of Maryland University College Library, in Reference Reviews (2015)

“Readex publishes respected subscription databases of full-text historical newspapers. Its America's Historical Newspapers collects and digitizes American newspapers; offerings include Early American Newspapers, which has recently released four additional series—series 6 (1741-1922), series 7 (1773-1922), series 8 (1844-1922), and series 9 (1832-1922). This collective addition adds 290 newspaper titles and over 4,300,000 pages to Early American Newspapers (series 1, CH, Apr'06, 43-4401; series 4 and 5, CH, Dec'12, 50-1798), bringing the complete collection to a substantial compilation of 2,000-plus newspaper titles from all 50 states, published between 1690 and 1922. Titles include valuable sources such as some 8,000 additional issues from New Orleans's Times-Picayune and some 15,000 issues from The Oregonian, now Oregon's largest newspaper. Other remarkable titles are Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and New York's The Daily Graphic--both heavily illustrated with hand-drawn graphics, making them a researcher's treasure. The complete list of additions is rich with titles of national and local importance.

“Libraries may purchase the entire collection or choose series, decades, or eras, in order to reflect a library's research needs. Readex's newspaper searching has a number of features that encourage precision and better results. The single search line can be expanded into a multiple-line search engine to better focus a complex research topic. Users may also narrow results by date, article type, language, state, and individual newspaper titles. The results present a small window of select information, with search terms in boldface for quick reading. Though other newspaper databases are available, the America's Historical Newspapers project is unique in the numbers of newspaper titles included, the number of individual issues included, and the inclusion of small local newspapers. Early American Newspapers is a real research gem for historians, all levels of college students, and genealogists. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.”
— C. W. Bruns, California State University-Fullerton, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 6-9, in Choice (July 2014)

“Readex has recently released Series 4 and 5 of this database, adding 268 newspaper titles and over 2,700,000 pages, all of which are available for full-text searching. These additional pages bring the current version of Early American Newspapers to over 1,000 historical newspaper titles with almost 9 million pages. Series 4 and 5 consist of newspapers from all 50 states and many diverse categories....Each additional release is a real bonanza to researchers....The Early American Newspapers database is unique among the many digitized newspaper collections for its size and for the inclusion of local newspapers; it is a functional database of real depth. 

“Searching newspaper databases can be laborious, but Readex's features assist users in quickly locating the articles they need....These features are immensely useful when evaluating results. The Series 4 and 5, 1756-1922 component is the latest addition to an exciting product and a valuable tool for historians and students in a wide variety of fields...Summing Up: Highly recommended...”

 —C. W. Bruns, California State University, Fullerton, reviewing Early American Newspapers, Series 4 and 5, in Choice (Dec. 2012)

"Readex has launched a new subscription-based Web site, America’s Historical Newspapers, that enables users to travel through time and call up issues of various newspapers to conduct, for example, a thorough study of the Civil War in the 1860s, analyze the stock market as it soared in the 1920s, or track the slugger Mickey Mantle’s baseball career throughout the 1950s. Using a simple search function, users can bring to life on their monitors the pages of an old newspaper from any major American city—and some small towns—and read about whatever person or event they choose.

"For example, one can call up any number of colonial-era newspapers to track the beginnings of the American Revolution in 1775 or search twentieth-century publications to investigate the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The newspapers provide graphic accounts of history’s disasters and joyous stories of its triumphs. Do you want to know what the American people thought about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” declaration? Look it up and read how ten different newspapers covered his first inaugural address in 1933. How electrifying was the 1927 baseball World Series? Call it up and read about it, game by game and inning by inning.

"The site allows users to race back in time, seeing how newspapers covered real drama. I went to the October 27, 1881, edition of the Tombstone Epitaph to read its account of the fabled gunfight at the O.K. Corral involving the legendary marshal Wyatt Earp. The lengthy, colorful story about the high noon shoot-out in Tombstone was just as melodramatic and colorful as the movies that depicted the battle. Happily, the story included a historical note not presented on film: that hundreds of men working in the Tombstone silver mines piled out of the mine shafts, 'like an invading army,' as the reporter wrote, when they heard news of the gun battle. Users can also access a national list of newspapers—organized by state—and compare how a paper in San Francisco covered the story with its treatment in a Boston publication....

"Overall, America’s Historical Newspapers is a fabulous tool for research. The new world of electronics and gadgetry may infuriate us (turn those cell phones off!) but here, in this Internet collection of historical newspapers, it is a wonder. I am researching a book on the Civil War and was able to call up dozens of 1860s newspapers. Full of vivid and stark accounts of the conflict, the newspapers provide the first draft of history, as they say—and a colorful one.

"The site will be extraordinarily helpful to scholars doing historical research, and it will also be rewarding for college and high school history teachers and students who want to use old newspapers as part of their study of the American story. Anyone with an Internet connection and wanderlust who wants to do a little journalistic time traveling can go to this site and come face to face with presidents, Oscar winners, Wall Street titans, and leaders of the women’s movement.

"And, as the American newspaper industry continues to shrink, it is always nice to go back in time and see it in its hearty majesty." 
—Bruce Chadwick, Professor of History, Rutgers University, in Journal of American History (September 2010)

“Composite Score: 4.75 Stars (out of 5)....The initial search screen makes it very clear which searching options are available. One can immediately start searching using the Google-like search box and the drop-down menu of searching options, including Headline, Standard Title (i.e., publication title), and Title as published....The results list includes a wealth of information for each item, including title of publication; publication date; published as; location; headline, and article type....The results list also includes a thumbnail image (actually larger than a thumbnail) of a portion of the article. This facilitates research by making it easy to browse through and eliminate irrelevant items....

“Compared to other databases that sometimes make it difficult to find a list of titles included, this one gives you a list that is straightforward, easy to find, and includes useful details such as language, number of issues included, and start/end dates. The ability to sort the list by various categories is useful....The list of titles included is impressive. The publications list indicates details of what is included in each title, including name changes, etc. The fact that all titles are full-image enhances the use of the database for research.” 
—Janice G. Schuster, Phillips Memorial Library, Providence College, in The Charleston Advisor (April 2010)

"A truly expansive archive of nearly 2,000 newspaper titles culled from all fifty states. At the time of this review, the fully searchable collection consists of three primary divisions, which together canvass the course of American history from 1690 to 1998. The first and largest of the three divisions, Early American Newspapers, is organized into seven series ranging from 1690–1922. Each series covers a range of years and geographic regions, which roughly expand in scope in conjunction with the geographic growth of the United States. A second division,African American Newspapers, 1827–1998, offers coverage of more than 170 years of African American history as recorded in 270 newspapers representing thirty-five states. The collection includes numerous historically significant titles, such as Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper in American history, which was published in New York City from 1827–29. The third and final division, Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808–1980, is a by-product of the ‘Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project,’ a national program to locate, collect, and make available the written contributions of Hispanic Americans from the colonial period to the present. The collection includes hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including Spanish language and English titles printed in the United States." 
—Daniel P. Barr, Robert Morris University, in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Winter 2010)

"Scholars and students of journalism history will find a rich resource of primary sources in Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922. The extensive database provides Web access to an expanding compilation of digitized newspapers published during 200-plus years….With the 2007 edition of series 4 and 5, the database numbers nearly 2,000 titles of full-text newspapers representing all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The collection contains an extensive array of papers, ranging from early colonial publications to regional weekly and metropolitan daily newspapers to the specialized press."
—Aleen Ratzalaff, Tabor College, in Journalism History (Spring 2008)

"Best of Reference 2007... 'You want a primary source from when?' One-stop shopping for full-text digital images from more than a thousand U.S. newspapers published from 1690 to 1922. Zoom in and out of particular time periods with a score of handy limit options."
—Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library (May 2007)

"Most Improved Product....exploding with new content, a much improved user interface..."
—The Charleston Advisor (October 2006)

“Readex has long been the name associated with collecting and preserving documents that define and describe the country’s early heritage. Early American Newspapers (EAN), with bibliographic and full-image access to nearly two centuries’ worth of local papers (from 23 East Coast and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia), represents one of the major components of its ‘Archive of Americana’ suite of digital collections….

“It’s as if the contents of hundreds of historical societies all across America were put on display, and a glance at the list of titles—from the Cahawba Press and Alabama Intelligencer(Cahawba, AL) to The Bee (Hudson, NY) to the lone issue of People’s Friend (Danville, KY)—should be enough to give scholars and historians a serious case of goose bumps….

“Institutions acquiring multiple Archive collections receive a discount; those that own the microform receive an additional discount-an approach we warmly applaud….

EAN's content possesses a local flavor that the other resources reviewed here cannot come close to matching.”
—Gail Golderman and Bruce Connolly, Union College, in Library Journal-supplement Net Connect (Fall 2005)


"...Rapid access to newspapers spanning centuries. ... Researchers in academic, public and historical libraries will save time with this resource. … Early American Newspapers, Series I is the researcher's choice to complement Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Early American Imprint Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819."
—Jetta Carol Culpepper, Special Programs Librarian, Murray State University Libraries and the College of Education, in Reference Reviews (November 2005)


"Early American Newspapers is a digitized, full image, completely searchable electronic database of newspapers that chronicle the rich and intriguing history of the United States' early years. The collection focuses on titles published in the 18th century but includes material from 1690 through 1876. This substantial database includes 617 newspaper titles, though many of the titles are far from complete. It features 1,344,099 pages as of 2005, with more to be added. The newspapers are primarily from a collection owned by the American Antiquarian Society. Series I includes newspapers from 23 eastern states and the District of Columbia. Series 2 and Series 3, covering other parts of the country, have recently been released.

“Researchers who remember working with clunky microfilm, with all its limitations, will be ecstatic about this product's ease of use and dynamic search capabilities. The search engine is highly intuitive.

“It is possible to combine Boolean operators in both simple and advanced searches and to limit to categories as varied as elections, legislation, poetry, letters, shipping news, and advertisements. Genealogical researchers will enjoy being able to limit searches to death or matrimony notices. Especially valuable with this type of database is the capability of dealing with the variant spellings so common in early American primary materials. The digitized images vary in quality but tend to be amazingly good, given that they are copies of deteriorating newsprint. This unique source of primary materials will be of great interest to larger public libraries and to academic libraries within the geographic areas covered. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers.”
—C. W. Bruns, California State University, Fullerton, in Choice (April 2006)

EAN
1690-1922

Ellen Broidy
Head, Collection Management Department
University of California, Los Angeles

Charles Clark
Professor of History
University of New Hampshire

James Danky
Newspaper and Periodicals Librarian
Wisconsin Historical Society

Susan Fales
Digital Collections Curator
Brigham Young University

Donald Farren
Scholar-in-Residence
Folger Shakespeare Library

Vincent Golden
Curator of Newspapers
American Antiquarian Society

Thomas Leonard
University Librarian
University of California, Berkeley

Jeff Pasley
Professor of History
University of Missouri

Whitman Ridgway
Associate Professor of History
University of Maryland

Henry Snyder
Director of the Center for Bibliographic Research
University of California, Riverside

John Tofanelli
Humanities Bibliographer
Columbia University

“The availability of the Early American Newspapers database of thousands of Manhattan newspapers from that period also helped—and I read them all!  (This is slightly less impressive than it sounds; each issue was normally only 4 pages.) But that's the challenge if you're trying to a write a narrative history that has anything like a novelistic level of detail—it's not just the big stuff, like the details of the case in itself, it's the little stuff like what color was someone's bedstead painted, what did they eat for dinner that night, whose house down the street got robbed the week before, which juror ran a grocery with another juror a decade earlier, that sort of thing.  You can't get that from standard accounts; it's only diaries and searchable scanned newspapers that can dredge up that stuff.” 
—Paul Collins, author of Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America's First Sensational Murder Mystery, on Fine Books & Collections.com (Jan. 2015)

America’s Historical Newspapers enabled me to trace the different contemporary and then later uses of the ‘scalping’ hoax. By way of background, let me point out that Franklin was profoundly troubled that the British military was paying Native peoples to create devastation on British Americans’ homes and to kill the people. Franklin had spent much of his time while in Pennsylvania (decades earlier) figuring out how best to negotiate peacefully with Indians. So he was outraged when the Indians became (by necessity and in an effort to preserve their own sovereignty) involved in the fray between Britons in North America and those in England. The Readex database made it possible for me to discover the posthumous uses to which Franklin’s hoax had been put, and, with terrible irony, I discovered that it was used to promulgate a form of Indian-hating by Americans in North America. The original target, British peoples in England, was lost, and the Indians received the central, negative thrust of the hoax. I think Franklin would have found this appalling. So I traced the uses of the hoax and made a record of it, so that others might see how periodical circulation takes on a life of its own." 
—Carla Mulford, Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists

“Between the years 1998-2008 my large research team had the good fortune to be funded by a generous grant from Mars, Incorporated, to investigate the culinary, medicinal, and social history of chocolate....Our research team drew extensively on Colonial Era and Federal Era documents available through Early American Newspapers, especially chocolate/cacao-related advertisements, articles, price currents, obituaries, and shipping news documents. As a scholar who formerly spent months using microfilm documents—winding and re-winding reels searching for specific documents on specific dates—I report here that the new technologies available through Readex have made my work and that of my students a hundred times easier. Now, with a click of our computer ‘mice,’ team members can retrieve thousands of documents that previously would have taken weeks to amass.”
—Louis E. Grivetti, co-editor of Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage (Wiley, 2009)

“The advent of Readex’s online edition of Early American Newspapers opens new avenues to research and dramatically reduces the time to do that research. Now, scholars not only can locate the original articles in context, they can also study how an article might have changed as it was reprinted in another newspaper....Early American Newspapers often allows scholars to find details when they only have general information.”
—Norman Desmarais, author of Battlegrounds of Freedom, The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in Canada and New England and The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in New York

“Despite the large number of convicts who were shipped across the Atlantic, finding information about them can be a challenge. Most of the convicts were illiterate, and many of them tried to hide their criminal past by changing their names and moving away after serving out their terms. The historian has to do some real digging to fill in the lives of these little-known men and women, and Readex’s Early American Newspapers is a tremendous help in this regard.

“Eighteenth-century American newspapers often carried announcements of convict ships leaving Great Britain and arriving in America with prisoners for sale as servants. Newspapers ran numerous advertisements for runaway convicts that describe in detail their clothing and bodily marks—faces pitted from small pox being a common characteristic. Sometimes the ads indicate their skills or behavioral tendencies, such as “addicted to boasting and telling of lies,” “loves liquor” or has “a very remarkable way of staring any body in the face that speaks to him.” Sometimes convict servants are described wearing an iron collar or handcuffs, and many times they escaped in pairs or in groups, occasionally in the company of an African slave.
—Anthony Vaver, publisher of EarlyAmericanCrime.com

“One afternoon, though, I discovered a unique online database of primary sources: Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876. No longer was insufficient research material a problem. With access to almost any colonial newspaper that I desired, I now had a library of pertinent primary information at my fingertips. Although I could give several examples that speak to the quality of research provided by these sources, three articles suffice to illustrate how this searchable database offered me unique insight into the New Yorkers’ reactions....These articles only begin to scratch the surface of the type of research made possible by the seven online series of Early American Newspapers. The amount of valuable information contained in these issues and the ease with which it can be browsed and searched cannot be overemphasized. In my case, just as the Tea Party was not confined to Boston, thanks to the digitization of Early American Newspapers, neither was my research limited to the print and microfilm materials held by my own small institution’s library.”
—David Brooks, Graduate, Taylor University, May 2010

“Readers of the Washington, D.C. newspaper The Daily National Intelligencer witnessed a strange and disturbing transformation in 1847, when the nation’s most popular literary character freely admitted that he had become a greedy, cynical killer. Soon enough this beloved American hero, whose name was synonymous with Yankee Doodle, would threaten to stage a military coup to seize the Capitol and overthrow Congress! Readers of the Early American Newspapers archive can follow along, gleaning important hints to decoding contemporary political rhetoric.”
—Aaron McLean Winter, National Tsing Hua University

"We are avid users of Early American Newspapers for our research on the Jefferson Papers and have been thrilled by its increased accessibility in a digital edition. Early American Newspapers has been of enormous value to us." 
—Martha J. King, Ph.D., Associate Editor, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton University

"Readex has put together a wondrous, easy-to-search database from the world's most important repositories of early American newspapers. Historians and other scholars who want to shave years off their research would do well to ask their college or university to purchase it."
—Robert L. Paquette, Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, Hamilton College

“My students are ecstatic about Readex’s digital Early American Newspapers. I’m delighted too, remembering the many hours I spent squinting over a microcard reader as I researched what became my first published article. At the time, I considered it a miracle that my small state university had a microcard reader, even though in summer condensation on the glass produced even deeper fog than the words themselves. Digitization will help democratize scholarship, but in the right hands it will also produce more thorough and imaginative research.”
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Phillips Professor of Early American History, Harvard University

“How jealous I am of the students who will be able to use this wonderful resource! The digital version of Early American Newspapers gives them an unfair advantage over all previous generations of scholars who had to spend months or even years seeking-and perhaps never finding-what can now be found with a few keystrokes. One five-minute search on ‘Washington Irving’ made visions of an article dance before my eyes. I turned up not only reviews of his works and accounts of his travels, but an article about the controversy surrounding Irving’s selection to a committee charged with designing a memorial to Shakespeare in London. (‘It does appear,’ wrote a London editor, ‘that a national monument could have been raised to Shakspeare without selecting as a Committee-man, a member of a republic which has denationalized itself.’) Who knew?”
—Benjamin Reiss, Associate Professor of English, Tulane University

“Digital Early American Newspapers is extremely valuable for scholars, teachers and students. I was able to search for specific individuals, commodities and objects, helping me to complete a study of one product and its distribution and consumption in America. Before this digitization, time would not permit me to search for goods of a certain name and merchants of a particular firm. Nor could I before scan across cities in search of specific debates on specific topics. For an American Revolution course I teach, I am now able to present in my lectures and handouts information on how debates over, for example, luxury ramified and endured after the 1780s and early 1790s.

Early American Newspapers also allows more effective research by my students on course-essay topics, such as one paper on the fear of piracy in the late 18th century. For certain subjects in material, economic and literary history, extracting needles from haystacks is key, and this digital collection will offer that ability. I especially like that it will allow graduate students to break their current focus on the Middle Colonies and States, rerouting attention to other cities and problems and facilitating previously difficult cross-urban comparisons.”
—David Hancock, Professor; Director, Atlantic Studies Initiative, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“With its digital Early American Newspapers collection, Readex has produced an excellent new resource. A religion department colleague has found articles that he did not know existed about an obscure Protestant sect he’s studying. I’ve been able to continue work in the ‘Massachusetts Spy’ that I’d had to set aside for lack of time to visit the microfilm reader, and a graduate student studying women criminals has been able to vastly expand her research base. We are all very impressed. This Web-based archive is a beaut!”
—Woody Holton, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

"The Early American Newspapers database is a digital miracle that will revolutionize the way in which scholars conceive of and undertake research. Ideas buried in crumbling and hard-to-find newspapers are now available with the click of a mouse. Not only is it possible to identify the emergence of ideas within specific texts and contexts, but it is now also practical, for the first time, to trace their diffusion through space and time, identifying plagiarisms, noting piracies, documenting permutations and revealing the structure of hitherto invisible networks of communication."
—Leon Jackson, Associate Professor of English, University of South Carolina

“The Readex digital Early American Newspapers (1690-1876) will revolutionize the way American history is taught and studied. Until now, only an intrepid few scholars have mined these phenomenal resources. The absence of any easily used indexes, the tedium of endless hours before the microfilm reader, and the simple scarcity of some of these primary sources has made truly comprehensive work in early American newspapers extremely difficult.

“With this new on-line resource, scholars and students alike will be able to easily and efficiently search these texts. And they will be able to do so in a way hitherto only dreamed of. Instead of focusing on modest runs, perhaps several years, of a very limited number of papers, they will now be able to search decades of a much larger variety of newspapers. If the recent work of researchers such as Jeffrey L. Pasley and David Waldstreicher is any indication, the yield of this new research will be monumental. We will have a whole new sense of exactly what it was early Americans knew about themselves and their world. For the first time, students too will be able to explore once pedestrian documents in ways never before possible. Imagine a research project on Jefferson’s first inauguration in which students can easily survey dozens of newspaper accounts. The possibilities boggle the mind.”
—Edward G. Gray, Professor of History, Florida State University

“Digital Early American Newspapers will revolutionize research in early American history by allowing full-text searches of a huge and constantly growing number of early newspapers ranging over centuries of time and the whole of the nation. No indexes exist for these materials. In the past, one had to pick a specific paper in a specific time and place and simply slog through it. It could easily take a couple days to thoroughly read one year of one daily newspaper, with no guarantee that anything related to one’s research question would be found. The process then had to be repeated paper after paper, year after year. Because of the low signal-to-noise ratio and the intense physical demands (on the eyesight especially) of this sort of research, many scholars and most students of early American history have avoided newspapers if they could, even though newspapers are by far the most extensive and useful source available on many political, cultural, and economic topics. The wide dissemination of the Early American Newspapers database should change all that.”
“Now research projects that once took weeks will be performed in an afternoon. New historical interpretations will arise in many areas simply because more historians will be able find out for the first time what was in the periodical press. In addition, the research capacities and consequent professional development of students will greatly expand.”
—Jeffrey L. Pasley, Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia

“Explore your early American ancestors and the America of yesterday!... A new invaluable resource.... Based largely on Clarence Brigham’s ‘History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820,’ this collection offers a fully text-searchable database of over one million pages, including cover-to-cover reproductions of historic newspapers! It contains a comprehensive listing of marriage, death, and court records found in early American periodicals such as the Boston Gazette, Gazette of the United States, New York Evening Post, and many more. For genealogists and scholars alike, Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876, offers an unprecedented look back into the extraordinary past of the United States!"
—The New England Historic Genealogical Society Web Site

“An essential source for early Americanists now available in a user-friendly format. Makes research for scholars and students much easier and more rewarding.”
—Graham Hodges, George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History, Colgate University

EAN
1690-1922
AHN

(formed in 2004)

Ellen Broidy
Head of Collections, Research and Instructional Services Department, Young Research Library (now retired)
University of California, Los Angeles

Charles Clark
Professor of History (deceased, 2013)
University of New Hampshire

James Danky
Formerly Newspaper and Periodicals Librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Currently a faculty associate at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Susan Fales
Digital Collections Curator
Brigham Young University

Donald Farren
Formerly Associate Director of Libraries for Special Collections
University of Maryland, College Park

Vincent Golden
Curator of Newspapers
American Antiquarian Society

Thomas Leonard
University Librarian (now retired) 
University of California, Berkeley

Jeff Pasley
Professor of History
University of Missouri

Whitman Ridgway
Associate Professor of History, Emeritus
University of Maryland

Henry Snyder
Director of the Center for Bibliographic Research (deceased, 2016)
University of California, Riverside 

John Tofanelli
Librarian for British and American History and Literature
Columbia University

"I'm a big fan of America's Historical Newspapers. The collection has been extremely helpful in piecing together the early history of some important words, like 'Ms.' and 'jazz.'"
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, language columnist for The Boston Globe and former On Language columnist for The New York Times

America’s Historical Newspapers enabled me to trace the different contemporary and then later uses of the ‘scalping’ hoax. By way of background, let me point out that Franklin was profoundly troubled that the British military was paying Native peoples to create devastation on British Americans’ homes and to kill the people. Franklin had spent much of his time while in Pennsylvania (decades earlier) figuring out how best to negotiate peacefully with Indians. So he was outraged when the Indians became (by necessity and in an effort to preserve their own sovereignty) involved in the fray between Britons in North America and those in England. The Readex database made it possible for me to discover the posthumous uses to which Franklin’s hoax had been put, and, with terrible irony, I discovered that it was used to promulgate a form of Indian-hating by Americans in North America. The original target, British peoples in England, was lost, and the Indians received the central, negative thrust of the hoax. I think Franklin would have found this appalling. So I traced the uses of the hoax and made a record of it, so that others might see how periodical circulation takes on a life of its own." 
—Carla Mulford, Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists

“For generations, biographers have used the same methods to conduct research: they waded through the paper trail left by their subject, piecing together a life from epistolary fragments. Based on what they found, they might troll through newspapers from specific dates in the hope of finding coverage of their subject. There were no new-fangled technologies that promised to transform their research, no way of harnessing machines to reveal new layers of historical truth.

“That’s all starting to change. Several campaigns to digitize newspapers — Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers available by subscription at research universities, or the free Chronicling America collection available at the Library of Congress — have the potential to revolutionize biographical research. Newspapers are often described as the “first draft of history,” and thanks to these new tools, biographers can tap them in ways that an earlier generation of scholars could only have dreamed of....

“With a few keystrokes, the aspiring biographer can resurrect the dead with far greater ease and speed than an army of research assistants. In the process, the fusty, antiquated art of researching and writing biographies may come to seem, of all things, cutting-edge.” 
The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2011 (The Biographer’s New Best Friend by Stephen Mihm)

"The genesis of Ms. lay buried in newspaper archives until earlier this year, when after much painstaking hunting through digitized databases I found The Sunday Republican article that started it all. ...After discovering that The Sunday Republican had recently been scanned and digitized by Readex, a publisher of digital historical materials, I was finally able to zero in on this forgotten document." 
— Ben Zimmer, On Language column, New York Times Magazine (Oct. 25, 2009)

“Advertisements and notices from newspapers provide indispensable documentation of the map trade, and America’s Historical Newspapers, part of the Readex Archive of Americana, greatly facilitates the task of locating that evidence.”
—David Bosse, Librarian and Curator of Maps, Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts

“I continue to be fascinated with the way in which the Greenwich Tea Burning has been remembered in this South Jersey community. I want to explain, for example, why the tea burning did not become part of the region’s historical consciousness until 1839. America’s Historical Newspapers has already helped me trace the way this event re-emerged as part of the patriotic culture of the community. For example, regional newspapers offer extension coverage of the 1874 centennial of the event and the 1908 erection of a monument to remember those who participated. Without this digital resource, it would have been very difficult to tell the story of the Greenwich Tea Burning; and without the story, we would have missed out on a slice of local history that illuminates the way Americans have remembered and celebrated their revolutionary past.”
—John Fea, Associate Professor of American History, Messiah College

America’s Historical Newspapers proved to be a treasure trove of informative for researchers seeking to document the history of the Frederick Muhlenberg house. Though physical evidence in the form of architectural and archaeological clues is paramount, newspaper records may also serve as a powerful tool when studying local historical buildings. Today, accessing those records is easier than Muhlenberg and his contemporaries could ever have imagined.”
—Lisa M. Minardi, Vice President, The Speaker’s House

“When I began work several years ago on my in-progress biography of William Fox (1879–1952), founder of Twentieth Century Fox, I knew I was in for trouble. Although Fox was arguably the most important of all the early movie moguls because of his foundational contributions to the art, technology and business of movies, he seemed to have largely disappeared from history....No wonder no one had ever written a William Fox biography....

“With digital technology revolutionizing the process of retrieving the past, information about Fox’s life promised to become far more accessible. Indeed, electronic research tools have made this project not only feasible but also endlessly interesting. Especially valuable—make that absolutely essential—have been newspaper databases such as America’s Historical Newspapers, which allow one to see directly how communities nationwide, both small and large, responded to the cultural lightning bolt of motion pictures. Here are ads aimed at the heartland, chatty newspaper articles about personalities both in front of and behind the camera and surprisingly rich coverage of industry trends. By the mid-1910s Americans had gone wild for the movies and their newspapers showed it.

“Data from America’s Historical Newspapers helped me solve one of my big challenges, which was to figure out how exactly William Fox became so successful so quickly as a movie producer.”
—Vanda Krefft, Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York

“My experiences have thus convinced me of the inestimable value of America’s Historical Newspapers. Indeed, without this database, it would have been impossible to recover and depict the dramatic impact the French Revolution had on popular American understandings of time. The raw evidence and search tools provided by Readex furthermore hold great promise for future scholarly inquiries. Whether it is comparing word usage across time, pinpointing the words of a particular newspaper or individual, or utilizing the database in another, as-yet-unknown mode, the opportunities appear limitless. In that sense, it might not be entirely foolish for the American historian today to assume a Wordsworthian pose and declare, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”
— Matthew Rainbow Hale, Assistant Professor of History, Goucher College

“Readers of the Washington, D.C. newspaper The Daily National Intelligencer witnessed a strange and disturbing transformation in 1847, when the nation’s most popular literary character freely admitted that he had become a greedy, cynical killer. Soon enough this beloved American hero, whose name was synonymous with Yankee Doodle, would threaten to stage a military coup to seize the Capitol and overthrow Congress! Readers of the Early American Newspapers archive can follow along, gleaning important hints to decoding contemporary political rhetoric.”
— Aaron McLean Winter, National Tsing Hua University

“The most revolutionary change in biography writing is the advent of digitized newspapers. Unlike microfilm, which simply reproduced newspapers on film, these new electronic records provide what we biographers and historians have long dreamed for—a means of finding a needle in the haystack.... Digitized collections, such as America’s Historical Newspapers, have turned what was once a research nightmare into a writer’s dream. Now, with the stroke of a few keys, we can unearth valuable information.’
—James McGrath Morris, author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (HarperCollins, 2010)

“I first became attuned to the historical enigma of mince pie in the mid-1990s....I put the riddle of mince pie on a back shelf in my mental pantry, and there it sat for fifteen years. In that interim, digital newspaper archives came into the world. This was a bitter development to anyone who had done historical work with newspapers in the waning days of the old dispensation, but it more than compensated me by unlocking the mysteries of mince pie with just eight simple keystrokes. The America's Historical Newspapers database, for example, yielded 246 responses to headline searches of the term “mince pie” and 6,037 responses to “full text” searches.”
—Clifford J. Doerksen, author of American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)

“Another insight came from discovery of how newspapers across the country reprinted original stories from a single source. I had known about these early wire services before but became fascinated by how reports of Ruggles’ activities were repeated in media chains across the Northeast and Midwest. Some even cropped up in the South. Long before Frederick Douglass had become a household name, readers in Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Maine could follow, applaud, or condemn Ruggles’ exploits. As my personal life became wonderfully complicated with the birth of my sons, my intellectual odyssey into David Ruggles’ life broadened without leaving the library. While such searches can never replace the friendships gained at the American Antiquarian Society and other archives, they offer invaluable assistance to time-pressed authors. Thanks in large part to America’s Historical Newspapers the biography of David Ruggles is now at hand.”
— Graham Russell Gao Hodges, George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies, Colgate University

“I have been a media historian for several decades, with expertise in the history of broadcasting. For years, I did my research the traditional way, using old magazines, old newspapers, and lots of old microfilm....But as I did my research, I accumulated a long list of unanswered questions. Sometimes I would find an article that mentioned a person or an event well-known in a given city, but not well-known enough to be explained in any resources available to me. I hoped that at some future time I might solve some of those mysteries, so that I could write a more accurate piece and tell the full story.

“When database research came along, it proved to be a welcome boost to my work, giving me instant access to publications that I previously could only obtain via Interlibrary Loan, a process that could take weeks. America’s Historical Newspapers has been especially useful, since it includes many newspapers from small and medium-sized cities. That’s important for me because many of the people I could not completely identify came from places like Trenton, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland and Seattle.”
— Donna L. Halper, Assistant Professor of Communication, Lesley University

“Motorcycle board track racing was the deadliest form of racing in the history of motorsports. Hundreds of lives were lost, both racers and spectators, during the relatively short-lived era of the boards. Yet in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, the dangers, motorcycle board track racing in the 1910s was one of the most popular spectator sports in America. Races attracted crowds of up to 10,000 fans. Young riders knew of the dangers, but chose to ignore them because the payoffs were so lucrative. Top racers could make $20,000 per year racing the board tracks, nearly a half-million dollars in today’s currency....America's Historical Newspapers made it relatively easy to research the rise and fall of the board track era.”
— Larry Lawrence, creator of “The Rider Files: Life and Times in Motorcycle Racing”

“...there is an immeasurable thrill at being able to find the exact newspaper article referenced in a letter to Jefferson, or the confirming biographical detail revealed in a death notice of an obscure individual who corresponded with Jefferson but who would otherwise have been lost to history. The ability to streamline a search helps us to be responsible stewards of the materials and provides time for other aspects of editing.

“One recent example of such targeted searching in online collections by Readex (especially America’s Historical Newspapers and Early American Imprints: Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819) is evident in the research we conducted for Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, the documents of which were published in Volume 33 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.”
— Martha King, Associate Editor, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

"Searching for old-style, obesity-cure advertisements for my work on media coverage of 'anti-fat pills,' I found invaluable resources in America's Historical Newspapers. I have used many archival databases before, but America's Historical Newspapers is by far the best.”
— Dr Michael Taylor, Research Officer, Health Sciences, La Trobe University (Australia)

  • Illuminating centuries of American history, literature, and culture
  • 150,000+ books, pamphlets, broadsides, and other important printed materials
  • Includes Early American Imprints, Nineteenth-Century American Drama and more
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  • Government publications offer unique insight into the American past
  • Acclaimed collections created through partnerships with leading institutions
  • Includes the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Territorial Papers of the U.S. and more
A great boon to scholars...making instantly accessible a wealth of information and documentation previously very difficult to locate and access.
Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
Title List
Reviews & Accolades

“Readex has been busy digitizing US historical resources ever since releasing Early American Imprints Series I: Evans, 1639–1800 and Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801–1819. These curated modules—each available for purchase separately—have grown into the Archive of Americana, now comprising more than 40 collections of monographs, periodicals, newspapers, government publications, broadsides, and other ephemera spanning four centuries. While approximately one-third of the individual collections organized into several larger thematic or format-based sets have not yet been completed, the archive now totals well over a half-million titles and pages numbering in the tens of millions, with coverage particularly strong for the 18th- and 19th-century period….

“Readex’s Archive of Americana…provides invaluable, virtually unprecedented access….Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners; general readers.”
— R. A. Aken, University of Kentucky in Choice (July 2017)

“For the past several years Readex...has been greatly expanding and augmenting its premier digital product line, the Archive of Americana, by adding new resources and modules such as historical ethnic newspapers, thematic collections such as the American Civil War primary sources, additions to the historical government publications, and new collections of books, pamphlets, and other printed ephemera to complement its American Historical Imprints book sets.”
— David D. Oberhelman, Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State in Reference Reviews, Volume 26, Issue 8

"This family of historical collections contains books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, government documents, and ephemera printed in America over three centuries. Collections include digital reproductions with searchable full text, giving researchers access to early American history through the advertisements, Bibles, broadsides, catalogs, speeches, literature, and more. A well-designed and integrated interface also facilitates an easy search/browse as a single collection or full-text searches across multiple collections..."
Reference 2009: Supplement to Library Journal

"...a goldmine of early American primary resources available at your fingertips."
Barbara Miller, Oklahoma State University in Reference Reviews (2008)

"Hundreds of thousands of documents spanning four centuries of American history are available in this large archive. Broadsides, ephemera, pamphlets, and booklets are available from 1639 to 1900. More than 1,300 newspaper titles, representing all fifty states, range in date from 1690 to 1922. U.S. Senate and House of Representatives reports, journals, and other documents are available from 1817 to 1980. Legislative and executive documents from the Early Republic are also included. The entire body of documents is keyword searchable, and, in addition, each collection can be searched and browsed individually. These documents shed light on many aspects of American social, political, economic, and cultural history, and can provide a valuable window into the daily lives of early Atlantic peoples. The collection of broadsides and ephemera is especially useful for exploring the history of printing in the United States, as all titles can be browed by bookseller, printer, or publisher." 
—History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web

"The Archive of Americana, produced by Readex in collaboration with the American Antiquarian Society, takes an important step toward integrating alternative non-writing-based textualities into its archive with one relatively simple innovation: the categories that appear on the search page. For example, in Early American Imprints the 'browse by' category of 'genre' includes 'addresses,' 'ballads,' 'hymns,' 'maps,' 'playbills' and 'songsters,' along with 'acrostics,' 'burlesques,' 'catechisms,' 'erotica,' 'hieroglyphic bibles,' 'psalters' and many others. These categories offer an additional level of structure for browsing that allows a user to see the past that the archive represents quite differently from the past on offer by EEBO, ECCO or Sabin Americana. The particularity of the textual forms represented here is much richer and more varied than, for instance, the categories that an advanced search in EEBO allows a user to explore. Additional 'browse by' categories in addition to 'genre' include 'subjects,' 'author,' 'history of printing,' 'place of publication' and 'language,' each with an array of subcategories that offer many different ways of structuring the textual field of early America. …

"The Archive of Americana promises to extend critical attention to the textual forms of early America in at least two major directions. In keeping with the AAS' commitment to history of the book, the archive invites attention to the material properties of texts and the means of their production and dissemination. The images in the archive provide readers with a visual sense of the text as a book or a broadside or a newspaper, even if the tactile and aural qualities are not (yet) represented. What is perhaps more surprising about the archive than its friendliness to print historians is, as I have already suggested, its revelations about early performance cultures. The process of cataloguing the types of printed materials and grouping them into categories makes visible a wide array of performance genres, some familiar, some not; and it helps illustrate the explosive growth of performance in the nineteenth century, at the putative moment of print's triumph over other media. …"
—Sandra M. Gustafson, University of Notre Dame in Early American Literature (June 2006)

"For more than 50 years, Readex has aided librarians and students with their research. … Readex now offers the Archive of Americana, which allows full-text online searching of four primary source collections that are valuable for humanities and social science research. … Bottom Line: Recommended for academic libraries wishing to increase research resources in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in American studies, history, and related disciplines."
—Anna Neatrour, Tufts University Library in Library Journal (May 15, 2005)

"The Archive of Americana collection is setting new standards for digital access and collection organization. The dimensions of time and space for genealogy researchers are greatly altered and improved by providing a unique collection of resources and tools that reveal many pleasant surprises."
—Sharon Sergeant, Director of Programs for the Massachusetts Genealogical Council in Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly (June 2005)

"An invaluable research aid that can help students understand history through a broad array of contemporaneous perspectives ranging from regional to international. These perspectives should allow students to develop and use the critical thinking skills that are necessary for understanding historical interpretation and context, as well as the conditions that create historical events. Readex and the American Antiquarian Society should be commended for their creation of theArchive of Americana. It is a major breakthrough in research because it has opened the archival gates to a new generation of eager high school historians."
—W. Dean Eastman and Barbara Skaryd Fecteau, Beverly High School inThe History Teacher (August 2006)

“...along with increased accessibility, the increasingly sophisticated search capabilities of the Archive of Americana allow even beginning students to make their way through unfamiliar texts with a facility and precision that were formerly restricted to only the most experienced scholars.”
— Michael P. Clark, Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Professor of English, University of California, Irvine

“I love putting history on trial in my undergraduate courses. These students still typically think of history as finding, identifying or uncovering a set of hard facts, but, as Hayden White reminds us, history has a subjective dimension—historians construct claims, create narratives, interpret facts, build cases, possess agendas, have pre-dispositions. History is much more interesting than students sometimes think.

“Well, there’s no better place to put history on trial—that is, to experience the role that invention plays in the writing of history—than the massive digital collections in the Archive of Americana.”
— Edward J. Gallagher, Professor of English, Lehigh University 

“Today many relevant primary sources are available online, and some—including several found in the Archive of Americana—challenge widely accepted historical understandings. From these and other resources, I have just completed a comprehensive history of dance in colonial America, covering dance of Native peoples as well as of European and African immigrants....

“Primary sources may seem daunting but they provide much new information. Beginning with references to names, dates, and events found in encyclopedias and history books, students and teachers can search and locate additional and often important details using electronic databases like the Archive of Americana. The hunt is well worth the effort!”
— Kate Van Winkle Keller, Colonial Music Institute and author of Dance and its Music in America, 1528-1789 

“The annual calendar of American public holidays offers a succession of teaching opportunities—none more fecund than the historical cornucopia of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving not only recounts history and legend—of the Pilgrims of 1621—but it has a history of its own—a remarkable story of considerable duration and complexity. For scholars and teachers, the holiday can be a barometer of the astonishing transformation of the United States itself. And students can enrich their understanding of nearly every American era through simple excursions into Thanksgivings past—via broadsides, pamphlets, proclamations, sermons and newspaper stories, accessible online through the Archive of Americana.... A keyword search for “Thanksgiving” in Early American Imprints, American Broadsides and Ephemera or America’s Historical Newspapers can produce thousands of items; more elaborate pairings of terms will generate hundreds more.”
— Matthew Dennis, Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies, University of Oregon 

“Important figures in the distribution of information in Colonial America were the post riders who carried both mail and printed materials. Because many postmasters were also printers, they relied heavily on these horseback-riding carriers to deliver the mail as well as the labors of their presses....By using the Archive of Americana to examine the work of one Colonial postmaster and printer, we can see how this intricate web of communication extended from publisher to publisher.”
— James David Moran, Director of Outreach, American Antiquarian Society 

“Recent access to new scholarly databases has enabled me to pursue an unfinished story I had encountered during my research about the Colfax Massacre of 1873, a racial conflict arising from the Reconstruction-era politics of Louisiana.....Using electronic versions of documents in the Archive of Americana and other new materials, I discovered how the personal drama of Calhoun v. Ryan fit into the larger national history of Reconstruction, including the Congressional election contest known as Newsham v. Ryan....Biographical details about Newsham, who faced Ryan only months into his tenure for November elections, appeared in the testimony of Newsham's brief to the Committee of Elections for the 41st Congress. Unlike Ryan's self-published pamphlet, serendipitously preserved in New York, Newsham's case was printed at the expense of the House of Representatives and included in the Readex digital edition of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set.”
— LeeAnna Keith, author of The Colfax Massacre 

“...the Archive of Americana fosters new interpretations of life and events in the 18th century and opens new horizons for interdisciplinary scholarship.”
— Norman Desmarais, author of Battlegrounds of Freedom, The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in Canada and New England and The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in New York

"Readex's databases transport you through time into 18th- and 19th-century America. The eloquent, cantankerous voices of the young nation come through loud and clear in literally millions of speeches, sermons, editorials and newspaper ads. The most remarkable thing is that just a few years ago, reading many of these publications would have required traveling hundreds of miles to rare-book libraries or waiting weeks for microfilm reels to arrive. Now you can summon them up instantly without getting up from your chair. My own book would not have been the same without Readex." 
— Adam Goodheart, Director, C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College, and author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Knopf, 2011)

"One of the reasons I like teaching at Messiah College is the effort of the library staff to keep up to date on digital databases....This small college in the tiny central Pennsylvania village of Grantham is a great place to study early American history thanks to the willingness of the library to invest in collections such as Early American Imprints and Early American Newspapers. I can't imagine working as an early American historian at Messiah without them.

"I am not alone. Writing at The New York Times, historian Steven Mihm extols the benefits of digitized (and searchable!) databases." 
— John Fea writing in his blog "The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Reflections at the intersection of American history, Christianity, politics, and academic life" (Sept. 13, 2011)

“To tackle this assignment, I deemed it necessary to peruse as many primary sources as possible, especially since Webster’s descendants had done so much to sculpt his public image....I also immersed myself in Webster’s own published words. As the first Webster biographer of the digital age, I could do much of this reading on my own laptop. The online resource The Archive of Americana now features scanned copies of most American newspapers between 1690 and 1922. By searching Webster’s name, I was able to find countless newspaper articles by and about this prolific journalist, including some not mentioned in the six-hundred-page tome A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster, edited by Edwin H. Carpenter (New York, 1958). Likewise, the early American imprints section of the database includes the full text of many of Webster’s books and speeches, such as his various Independence Day orations and his 1806 ‘compend.’” 
— Joshua Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of American Culture (Putnam, 2011)

“I cannot tell you how much the Readex historical databases have helped me over the years in my research and writing. Early American Imprints and Early American Newspapers have become integral to the way in which I write and conceptualize. And the new Supplements from the Library Company will be another valuable addition to the Archive of Americana.

“As much as I cannot think of writing without a word processor, it is impossible for me to envision historical research before Readex's digital editions. These collections are especially crucial for scholars working from outside of the United States.” 
— Dr. Eran Shalev, Department of History, Haifa University, Israel

"The Archive of Americana is superb and has eliminated for me the countless miles of travel and slow, tedious searches that were once necessary to access the important material encompassed by it." 
—F. Christopher Tahk, Professor Emeritus, Art Conservation Department, Buffalo State

“It has become commonplace to say that each new electronic resource will change the way we know the world. Well, this one truly will. Readex's digital editions of Early American Newspapers and Early American Imprints have the power to fundamentally reshape our understanding of early America. Students will be able to access the life and literature of the distant past from the comfort of their libraries and dorm rooms. And even scholars who have worked for decades in the printed corpus of the Americas before 1800 will find hidden treasures as they explore familiar sources in these meticulous, full-text, machine-searchable editions.” 
—Jane Kamensky, Associate Professor of History, Brandeis University

“The Readex Archive of Americana is an extraordinary family of digital research collections, indispensable to a solid program in early American history. Early American Imprints, Series I brings the mother lode of primary source material from colonial and Revolutionary America to one's electronic fingertips. These imprints, along with the Archive’s other valuable collections, vastly expand an institution’s capacity for early American research by students and faculty. Graduate and undergraduate students can now write papers awash with rich, original sources, inevitably leading to many more-and better-theses and dissertations. Without these collections, I would cry.”
—Bruce Daniels, Professor of History, University of Texas at San Antonio


“As a scholar I've largely gravitated toward research that demands a needle-in-a-haystack approach-it's been both a delight and a curse. These new digital collections from Readex help remove that curse and open a world of resources for close textual analysis of elusive materials. And the remote access offered by the digitized Early American Imprints and Early American Newspapers makes the study of distant texts and contexts accessible in an astonishing and unprecedented way. Students too will profit, as they are empowered to do research-even from Oregon, three thousand miles from Worcester, Massachusetts-that will take them into heart of early American life and letters.

“Teaching a course on the history of American patriotism, I had students do a simple search. They were astonished at what they turned up on 'patriot' and 'patriotism' for the colonial period and early republic-odd poems and elegies, songs and sermons, antique disquisitions that seemed strangely prescient. If primary sources are the thing to excited students-as historians themselves have been excited since the beginning of history-then these resources are unbeatable!"
—Matthew Dennis, Professor of History, University of Oregon


“Readex’s new web-based Archive of Americana, including Early American Imprints (1639-1819) and Newspapers (1690-1876), is more than another tool for access to primary sources. Its historical breadth and depth represent a revolutionary advance for all scholars and students of American history. Never before could specific subjects and topics be located, identified, and organized with such ease and sophistication in such a large historical collection of print and image material.

“Working extensively with the advanced search capabilities of the digital Archive, I personally have had immediate access to thousands of original documents in hundreds of dedicated searches-making possible an intense level of productivity in my current project not possible earlier with microfiche cards. Researchers, teachers, and students with Web access literally do not need to leave their home institution without this all-important resource. Quality, power, and relevance appropriately describe the significance of Readex's achievement.”
—Burt Bledstein, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago


“The Archive of Americana databases collectively are a research tool more powerful than anything historical researchers of early America have ever possessed. Once the word is out, it is almost certain to change the way scholarship in this field is done.

“Digital Early American Imprints opens for full-text searches by students and faculty virtually every known book and pamphlet published in America before 1820, making possible for the first time thorough research in the era of Thomas Jefferson.”
—Jeffrey L. Pasley, Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia


“Quite simply, the Readex digital Archive of Americana is one of the most significant innovations in the study of American print culture. At a time when commentators and politicians tend to misquote the rhetoric of Revolutionary America, the digital Early American Imprints (Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker) andEarly American Newspapers promote not only unsurpassed access to early texts but also new and unique fields of rhetorical studies.

“In a matter of minutes, students and scholars can conduct primary research in countless areas of cultural significance that would have taken months, if not years, before digitization. With a few keystrokes, comprehensive databases can be created, bringing together a rich and surprising array of textual references, and the written representations of all manner of terms, issues, concepts, objects, and events can be studied with exceptional accuracy. Readex's digital collections represent a major breakthrough in the study of early American print culture.”
—Daniel E. Williams, Chair and Professor of English, Texas Christian University


“With its search tools, the Archive of Americana has revolutionized research using early American printed sources. No scholar can make generalizations with confidence without using the search features of the Readex Archive, unless the generalizations are limited to the specific texts the scholar has read.

“Some years ago I gave a paper on sermons on liberty on the eve of American Independence. I compiled the database by looking for sermons on Galatians 5:1 in all the sermons listed in the microform edition of Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 for the years 1775-1776. Although this was pretty good for the time, it would now be out of date, because using your Archive I could search all the actual sermons (not just the ones on Galatians 5:1) to see how the word liberty was used. When I was an undergraduate I read the 'Pennsylvania Gazette' from 1765-1766 looking for items about the Harrisburg area. This project took three weeks with my head in a microfilm reader about six hours a day. Now that sort of search could be done in an afternoon.”
—Jon Alexander, O.P., Associate Professor of History, Providence College


“Readex's digital Early American Imprints and Newspapers are of enormous benefit to American historians. As a historian of the African-American experience, I have found the easy availability of early African-American newspapers and pamphlets and the facility of conducting specific word searches in these digitized sources to be invaluable for my work.”
—Manisha Sinha, Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst


“I expect that any scholar of colonial and early national print culture will share my enthusiasm for the digitization of Early American Imprints and especially Early American Newspapers. This product offers an exponential leap over the microform version in our ability to use the original sources. We can now search full text by word or phrase, easily browse by date or title, and navigate through a dense page without losing sight of its overall structure. The user interface is superior to other comparable resources, like the historical ‘New York Times’ or the online ‘American Periodical Series.’

"I teach the history of the media; with this resource available, assignments that require students to look through original newspapers will no longer be burdensome. The original microform editions of these collections made these sources far more available; the online version brings them easily within reach of anyone lucky enough to be associated with an acquiring institution.”
—John Nerone, Professor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


“Many of the documents are startling in their content and can bring energy and even joy into the classroom.”
—Eric Rothschild, 30-year AP U.S. history teacher and author of the "Teacher's Guide to Advanced Placement United States History"


“The Archive of Americana is an invaluable research aid that helps students understand history through a broad array of contemporaneous perspectives, ranging from regional to international. These perspectives allow students to develop and use the critical thinking skills necessary for understanding historical interpretation and context, as well as the conditions that create historical events."
—Dean Eastman, 30-year social studies teacher and Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, Beverly High School, Beverly, Mass.

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