Well, it’s been a relatively busy week. I wrote earlier about being given a month’s access to the full archive America’s Historical Newspapers. This investigation has been fruitful: I’ve found a new reprinting in the Jamestown Journal of Jamestown, NY (12 Oct. 1843) and several interesting articles that reference the story, one of which will show up in the revision of the article I’m working on, “‘Taken Possession Of’: Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Evangelical Canon.”
Later in the week, a link in Dan Cohen’s twitter feed led me to a Language Log post that mentions the Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers archive (whew!). I didn’t know this archive, and a quick search there returned yet another witness, from the Lancaster Intelligencer (1 Feb. 1859). This one includes a short editorial preface—these are my favorite witnesses, as they add not only to the corpus of reprintings but also to the cultural narrative surrounding the story.
This project continues to grow exponentially; every new resource discovered returns new results.
At the Poe Studies’ Association Conference last weekend, conversations about this site invariably turned to questions about what online newspaper archives are out there. Most folks are aware of American Periodicals Series Online, but not many of the others that I’ve used . So below I’ve compiled my list so far. These all bear primarily on 19th Century American research, but some include wider resources. They’re organized here alphabetically, but I’d say that APS Online, the Gale Group’s Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, the Access Newspaper Archive, and the Making of America Projects have been most useful to me. Final caveat—some of these live behind pay-walls. At UVA we subscribe to them, but I’m not certain how many will be accessible if your school doesn’t. Noticing Google Books in this list, my next post will be a “true/but” response to Geoff Nunberg’s recent article, “Google Books: a Metadata Train Wreck.” If you spot any fixable problems with these links, please let me know. If you know an archive of 19th Century American periodicals that I haven’t included, please, please let me know.
Access Newspapers Archive (http://access.newspaperarchive.com)
Accessible Archives (http://www.accessible.com/accessible/preLog)
America’s Historical Newspapers (http://infoweb.newsbank.com/?db=EANX)
American Periodicals Series Online (http://proquest.umi.com/login)
Gale Group, Nineteenth Century U. S. Newspapers (http://infotrac.galegroup.com)
Google Books (http://books.google.com)
Library of Congress, American Memory Collection (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html)
Library of Congress, Chronicling America Collection (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)
Making of America Project, Cornell University (http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/)
Making of America Project, University of Michigan (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/)