A Hearty Hello!
Welcome to the first posting on our blog, along with the launching of our new Web site NewsInHistory.com. This site is all about American history, as presented in the incredible collection of American historical newspapers we have assembled – thousands of titles from all fifty states, containing hundreds of millions of newspaper articles. We have made digitized images of all these articles, to show you exactly what readers saw on the day they picked up their papers.
Frequently, we will be adding free Featured Articles to NewsInHistory.com that explore important aspects of American history. Each article has a special feature: embedded within is an actual historical newspaper article from our collection, to let you experience using our archive. The newspaper articles are presented in an Image Viewer that lets you enlarge and manipulate the images to make them easier to read.
In my role as blog editor, I have the enviable task of combing through this extensive newspaper archive and sharing with you whatever I find that is powerful, astonishing, funny, or perhaps simply weird.
I’ll use blog postings to supplement what you can read in the featured articles. Historical books and Web sites can tell us the who, what, when, where and even the why of a historical event. But what was it like to actually be there? Newspaper reporters, with their eyewitness accounts, can fill in the details of history -- often the most interesting parts.
That is the value of a historical newspaper archive, and uncovering some of its many treasures is the purpose of this blog. I have several hundred million newspaper articles to discover – I should be able to wrap up this job in two or three lifetimes. Come and join me as we explore this collection; it’s going to be fun!
Your tour guide,
Tony Pettinato
I understand that when writing a blog, it’s necessary to show a picture and say a few words about yourself, so that people don’t think a nameless, faceless committee or advisory board is running the show. Here I am, a real person. My name is Tony Pettinato, and I live in Deerfield, Mass. I did my undergraduate studies in English at Oberlin College, my graduate work in Journalism at UC Berkeley, and have been a reporter for six newspapers. For the past fourteen years I have worked at NewsBank, six of those as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort that digitized and indexed twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my lifelong interest in American history. And that led me to editing this history blog!
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