Chronicling America

The Library of Congress’s Chronicling America web­site has lists of news­pa­pers, search­able and nav­i­ga­ble by title, as well as tens of thou­sands of images of news­pa­pers from 1880 to 1922 from 15 states (plus the District of Columbia):

• Arizona
• California
• District of Columbia
• Florida
• Hawaii
• Kentucky
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• New York
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia, and
• Washington.

The site cat­a­log is very handy for find­ing out about local news­pa­pers that might be avail­able through inter-library loan (ILL) on micro­film and by other means in libraries across the country.

You can even pre­dict the URL for a county you are inter­ested in. For exam­ple, the URL for Monroe County, West Virginia is:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/west%20virginia/monroe/

And the URL for Valley County, Nebraska is:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/nebraska/valley/

So, the pat­tern comes down to:

Prefix: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/ [which, itself is not a work­able URL]

To this, you append the state, a slash, then the county, and a slash.

State (with spaces replaced by %20, the HTML code for a space): some%20state/

County (with spaces replaced by %20, the HTML code for a space): some%county/

Happy hunt­ing!