Cool Newspaper Websites

While doing background research for a project, I discovered some cool newspaper websites. Newspapers are among my favorite sources, and these sites not only provide access to many digitized newspapers but also allow for easy searching. Although not exclusively related to the Civil War era, there are plenty of newspapers from that time period included on these websites. The granddaddy is the Chronicling America project, a joint venture of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Chronicling America features a vast array of digitized newspapers. There are a number of State ventures too including the California DigitalNewspaper Collection that has digitized 61,351 issues; that equals 544,474 pages. The Colorado Historic NewspapersCollection is a favorite of mine with 600,000 + digitized pages available for view. Stories about mining ventures, accidents, murders, the war in the East, and many other topics fill the pages of Civil War era Colorado newspapers, and of course the wonderful advertisements make for interesting reading. Historical research has entered a kind of Golden Age. If someone had told me twenty years ago that someday I could view images of Civil War era newspapers on my computer screen, I would have thought they were crazy!