Author: Louisa Trott

From the Morgan County Press, 1918. Look out for Wartburg’s Morgan County Press,  and more World War One-era Tennessee newspapers, on Chronicling America in 2016.

The Mickie Says cartoon panel was created by Charles Sughroe and syndicated through the Western Newspaper Union from 1918. Each week, the cartoon’s young protagonist – a “printer’s devil” at a small town newspaper – reminded readers to support their hometown newspaper in various ways such as keeping their subscription up to date, taking out ads in the paper, or reporting local news.

The character later appeared in his own comic strip – Mickie the Printer’s Devil – which follows the daily goings-on in a small-town newspaper printing office. Our friends over at the Vermont Newspaper Digitization Project highlighted the comic strip in an article on their website – check it out here.

Mickie’s creator, cartoonist Charles Sughroe, had plenty of experience to draw on having worked as a printer’s devil himself, at his father’s newspaper the Stockton Herald-News in Illinois. Following his boyhood experience in the print office, Sughroe spent four years at the Chicago Art Institute before working as a free-lance commercial artist, and later gaining national recognition for his Mickie cartoon. An article in trade journal, American Printer, in 1922 says, “Every Mickie cartoon is founded on some actual happening, so it is not overdrawn.” Some of Sughroe’s other comic panels and strips – People of our Town and Town Pests – can be found by searching Chronicling America‘s newspapers (for example, this page from the Leavenworth Echo, Wa., features both).

More information on Mickie and Sughroe is available at The Stripper’s Guide – a comprehensive website with tons of information about the history of the American newspaper comic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In October, the total number of pages available via Chronicling America surpassed 10 MILLION! And it was a Tennessee batch that took it through that barrier!

The latest Tennessee titles to be added are: Putnam County Herald (1911-1921), Sneedville News (1913-1922), Crossville Chronicle (1915-1922), Grainger County News (1917-1922), and Memphis News Scimitar (1918-1920). Further issues of the Chattanooga News and the Camden Chronicle were added, bringing the coverage to Jan. 1918-1920 and 1890-1922 respectively.

Over the last few years you’ve enjoyed browsing and searching America’s historical newspapers on Chronicling America, but all the time you were thinking, I know there’s so much more I could be doing with this data. Well now’s your chance!

NEH has launched a competition designed to encourage you to “develop data visualizations, web-based tools, or other innovative web-based projects using a user-friendly Application Program Interface (API) to explore the data contained in Chronicling America data.”

Read more about the challenge on this website. The contest is open to the public (some restrictions apply, see Rules on the website) – enter as an individual or group. This would make a great collaborative project for, say, historians, social scientists, digital humanists,  and computer scientists. Dig into the data and create something brilliant!!

To help start the cogs turning, here are some links to projects that have used Chronicling America data for visualizations, and also links to other data visualization projects, for inspiration.

Journalism’s Voyage West
From Stanford University’s Rural West Initiative, this visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. A panel on the right provides contextual information.

 

Viral Texts
Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines. From Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, this project explores shared texts among pre-Civil War newspapers.

 

Visualizing Newspaper History
Created by a UCSD undergraduate in 2011, this animation uses 5930 front pages from the Hawaiian Star covering 1893-1912 period.

 

 

Visit the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab to explore a variety of data visualization projects, some of which use newspaper data (though not from Chronicling America).

Here’s a handwritten and illustrated poem by Edmund Vance Cooke.

The Chronicling America website will not be available this weekend due to maintenance on all Library of Congress websites.

Here is the announcement from the Library of Congress:

Websites Down Aug. 28-30, Reading Rooms Closed Aug. 29

The Library’s public websites (loc.gov, copyright.gov & others) will be unavailable from 7 p.m. ET, Friday, Aug. 28 through Sunday, Aug. 30.

The Congress.gov website will be available over the weekend of August 28-30. Data will be current through Thursday, Aug. 27, and updates will resume on Monday, Aug. 31.

On Saturday, Aug. 29, all reading rooms and research areas, Library Shop, Madison and Adams buildings will be closed to the public.

The Thomas Jefferson Building’s Great Hall and exhibitions will be open to the public from 8:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 29. No food service will be available throughout the day, however the vending lounge in the Thomas Jefferson Building cellar will be open.

The Architect of the Capitol will be conducting essential maintenance on the Capitol Hill campus from Friday, Aug. 28, through Sunday, Aug. 30, resulting in power outages that will require these closings.

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PR 15-A02
08/14/15
ISSN 0731-3527

The Chattanooga News, July 1918 – December 1920, is now available on Chronicling America.

Issues feature war reports, news from the home front, editorial cartoons, and the daily weather report from Billy ‘Possum.

 

The holiday wouldn’t be complete without some patriot music …

Looking for Tennessee newspapers? Looking for information about Tennessee newspapers? Check out the new Resources tab right here on this website!

The resources cover both historical and current newspapers, where to find them (online and print), publications about Tennessee newspapers (note the link to an extended bibliography), and a selection of special interest newspaper-related items and places in Tennessee.

Within these pages, you can find downloadable spreadsheets such as these on the “Where to Find Tenn Newspapers” page: Tennessee titles available in Chronicling America; Historical Tennessee titles in subscription databases. And these on the “Resources About TN Newspapers“: “Lost” Tennessee newspapers – a list of newspapers that we’ve found references to, but for which there are no extant copies; African American Tennessee newspapers – not an exhaustive list, but a work-in-progress. We’re compiling it from several different sources, and will add to it from time to time.

Please let us know if have any other recommendations to add to these resources.