Author: Louisa Trott

Long before the Disney movie Newsies (1992) and the subsequent Broadway musical, there was a real-life newsie acting in the movies – George L. Morgan. This illustrated article is from the Seattle Star in Chronicling America.

As the article explains, in 1913, Morgan – a 13 year old newsboy – took the leading role in Jimmy’s Princess, which featured players from “the first motion picture company composed exclusively of children.” Sadly, the film is long since lost.

However, I did discover another newspapering connection! The article notes that Morgan was the grandnephew of Rev. George Lorimer, “who was at one time a well-known actor.” Lorimer was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and travelled to London at a young age where he reportedly assisted his stepfather, a stage manager at the Theatre Royal, and it was here that he began acting. Lorimer moved to the US in 1856, with the hope of furthering his acting career. Instead, after graduating from Georgetown College, Kentucky, he ordained as a Baptist pastor and dedicated his life to serving the Baptist church, and writing. Lorimer  married Belle Burford and they had one daughter, Edith, and one son, George Horace Lorimer. And this is where the newspapering connection comes in …

George Horace Lorimer was a journalist, author and “one of America’s most important editorial figures.”* In 1898, Lorimer went from being a reporter on the Boston Post to literary editor at the Saturday Evening Post, but within weeks was appointed editor-in-chief of the then small, obscure publication. Over the next couple of decades, Lorimer took the circulation of the Saturday Evening Post from 1,800 to over 1 million. Under his editorship, the magazine published stories and essays by many popular writers. In 1903, for example, the Post published a serialized version of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Lorimer was aslo responsible for hiring then-unknown artist Norman Rockwell as an illustrator. Rockwell’s work, and association with the publication, is now legendary.

I wonder if Lorimer ever saw his nephew’s cinematic appearance in Jimmy’s Princess?

* From George Horace Lorimer’s obituary in Time, November 1937, Vol. 30, No.18, p66.

Looking for a last-minute Halloween costume idea? Check out the Philadelphia Public Ledger from 100 years ago! (click on image above)

For more newspaper features about old Halloween customs, visit the Library of Congress Topics in Chronicling America page. Read all about the holiday’s old traditions, such as rituals carried out by young ladies in the hope of revealing the face of their future husband:

Disclaimer: we cannot be held responsible for any bodily harm you may come to if you seriously decide to attempt this nonsense!

Join Louisa Trott, TNDP Project Coordinator, for a FREE Brown Bag lecture at the East Tennessee History Center this Wednesday: From Rags to Pixels: East Tennessee’s Newspapers from the 19th Century to Digitization.
Louisa will talk about the Tennessee Newspaper Digitization Project and share some of the intriguing stories found in East Tennessee’s 19th century newspapers.
Wednesday Oct 29 – noon
East Tennessee History Center, 601 S. Gay Street, Knoxville

More often than not, jokes in 19th century newspapers leave modern readers scratching their heads rather than splitting their sides.

The Victorian Meme Machine is a new project that will attempt to entice a 21st century audience into seeing the funny side of Victorian humor.

“A collaboration between the British Library Labs and Dr Bob Nicholson (Edge Hill University), the project will create an extensive database of Victorian jokes and then experiment with ways to recirculate them out over social media.” Source: British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog

Sounds like a laugh? Find an introduction to the project here or watch this video presentation.

This is a wonderful example of how digitized newspapers are being used for data mining. I’d love to hear from anyone with ideas for data mining Tennessee’s digitized newspapers!

Thanks to our friend Jenni Salamon of the Ohio Digital Newspaper Program for telling us about this project.

As you can see from the article and photos above, I recently had the honor of meeting a man whose contribution to the world of newspapers and journalism is widely recognized not only in his home state of Tennessee but far beyond. Walter’s story is, thankfully, well-documented—a quick internet search will return several nice articles about him (for example, here)—so I won’t take up space re-writing it. I just wanted to share this article here as I think it’s a great image of our newspaper future learning from our newspaper past, and vice versa. I loved listening to Walter’s stories about his reporting assignments during World War II (he interviewed Tito in Yugoslavia!), his time at the Washington Post, and his ownership of the Harriman Record. The visit also gave me a chance to tell Walter a little about the newspaper digitization project.

Thanks to Greg Sherrill (TPA Executive Director and TNDP Advisory Board member) for arranging this visit.

The Library of Congress’s websites–including Chronicling America–will be temporarily offline this weekend. Please see the announcement below:

Websites Down Aug. 22-24, 2014

The Library’s public websites (loc.gov, copyright.gov & others) will be unavailable from 7 p.m. ET, Friday, Aug. 22 through Sunday, Aug. 24.

The Congress.gov website will be available over the weekend of August 22-24. Data will be current through Thursday, August 21, and updates will resume on Monday, August 25.

On Saturday, Aug. 23, 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. 23. 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. 22, through Sunday, Aug. 24, resulting in power outages that will require these closings.

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PR 14-A03
08/14/14
ISSN 0731-3527