The first newspaper known to be printed by an enslaved person, the nation’s oldest school newspaper, and a newspaper printed on top of Mount Washington will soon be part of the digital Library of Congress as New Hampshire joins the project known as Chronicling America.
The National Endowment for the Humanities will pay for a number of historic New Hampshire newspapers to be digitized and added to the 19 million pages of newspapers published between 1777 and 1963 that are already part of the project. This means that newspapers from all 50 states as well as Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands will now be included in the collection, which can be seen online for free.
The collection is not a complete database of newspapers but is a selection of papers that are historic either because they tell of famous events or because of the newspaper’s own history.
Dartmouth College will serve as the New Hampshire state hub, partnering with the New Hampshire State Library, the New Hampshire Historical Society and the University of New Hampshire Library to identify historical newspapers that reflect the state for inclusion in Chronicling America.
Among the first newspapers to be digitized and added to the online repository are the New Hampshire Gazette, the first newspaper known to be printed by an enslaved person; The Dartmouth, which was founded in 1799 as the Dartmouth Gazette and is the nation’s oldest school newspaper; and Among the Clouds, a newspaper printed atop of Mount Washington between 1889 and 1917.
For information, see https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
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