Early American Newspapers: Series 01, 1690-1876: From Colonies to Nation | Readex

“The availability of the Early American Newspapers database of thousands of Manhattan newspapers from that period also helped—and I read them all!  (This is slightly less impressive than it sounds; each issue was normally only 4 pages.) But that’s the challenge if you’re trying to a write a narrative history that has anything like a novelistic level of detail—it’s not just the big stuff, like the details of the case in itself, it’s the little stuff like what color was someone’s bedstead painted, what did they eat for dinner that night, whose house down the street got robbed the week before, which juror ran a grocery with another juror a decade earlier, that sort of thing.  You can’t get that from standard accounts; it’s only diaries and searchable scanned newspapers that can dredge up that stuff.” 
—Paul Collins, author of Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery, on Fine Books & Collections.com (Jan. 2015)

“America’s Historical Newspapers enabled me to trace the different contemporary and then later uses of the ‘scalping’ hoax. By way of background, let me point out that Franklin was profoundly troubled that the British military was paying Native peoples to create devastation on British Americans’ homes and to kill the people. Franklin had spent much of his time while in Pennsylvania (decades earlier) figuring out how best to negotiate peacefully with Indians. So he was outraged when the Indians became (by necessity and in an effort to preserve their own sovereignty) involved in the fray between Britons in North America and those in England. The Readex database made it possible for me to discover the posthumous uses to which Franklin’s hoax had been put, and, with terrible irony, I discovered that it was used to promulgate a form of Indian-hating by Americans in North America. The original target, British peoples in England, was lost, and the Indians received the central, negative thrust of the hoax. I think Franklin would have found this appalling. So I traced the uses of the hoax and made a record of it, so that others might see how periodical circulation takes on a life of its own.” 
—Carla Mulford, Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists

“Between the years 1998-2008 my large research team had the good fortune to be funded by a generous grant from Mars, Incorporated, to investigate the culinary, medicinal, and social history of chocolate….Our research team drew extensively on Colonial Era and Federal Era documents available through Early American Newspapers, especially chocolate/cacao-related advertisements, articles, price currents, obituaries, and shipping news documents. As a scholar who formerly spent months using microfilm documents—winding and re-winding reels searching for specific documents on specific dates—I report here that the new technologies available through Readex have made my work and that of my students a hundred times easier. Now, with a click of our computer ‘mice,’ team members can retrieve thousands of documents that previously would have taken weeks to amass.”
—Louis E. Grivetti, co-editor of Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage (Wiley, 2009)

“The advent of Readex’s online edition of Early American Newspapers opens new avenues to research and dramatically reduces the time to do that research. Now, scholars not only can locate the original articles in context, they can also study how an article might have changed as it was reprinted in another newspaper….Early American Newspapers often allows scholars to find details when they only have general information.”
—Norman Desmarais, author of Battlegrounds of Freedom, The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in Canada and New England and The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in New York

“Despite the large number of convicts who were shipped across the Atlantic, finding information about them can be a challenge. Most of the convicts were illiterate, and many of them tried to hide their criminal past by changing their names and moving away after serving out their terms. The historian has to do some real digging to fill in the lives of these little-known men and women, and Readex’s Early American Newspapers is a tremendous help in this regard.

“Eighteenth-century American newspapers often carried announcements of convict ships leaving Great Britain and arriving in America with prisoners for sale as servants. Newspapers ran numerous advertisements for runaway convicts that describe in detail their clothing and bodily marks—faces pitted from small pox being a common characteristic. Sometimes the ads indicate their skills or behavioral tendencies, such as “addicted to boasting and telling of lies,” “loves liquor” or has “a very remarkable way of staring any body in the face that speaks to him.” Sometimes convict servants are described wearing an iron collar or handcuffs, and many times they escaped in pairs or in groups, occasionally in the company of an African slave.
—Anthony Vaver, publisher of EarlyAmericanCrime.com

“One afternoon, though, I discovered a unique online database of primary sources: Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690-1876. No longer was insufficient research material a problem. With access to almost any colonial newspaper that I desired, I now had a library of pertinent primary information at my fingertips. Although I could give several examples that speak to the quality of research provided by these sources, three articles suffice to illustrate how this searchable database offered me unique insight into the New Yorkers’ reactions….These articles only begin to scratch the surface of the type of research made possible by the seven online series of Early American Newspapers. The amount of valuable information contained in these issues and the ease with which it can be browsed and searched cannot be overemphasized. In my case, just as the Tea Party was not confined to Boston, thanks to the digitization of Early American Newspapers, neither was my research limited to the print and microfilm materials held by my own small institution’s library.”
—David Brooks, Graduate, Taylor University, May 2010

“Readers of the Washington, D.C. newspaper The Daily National Intelligencer witnessed a strange and disturbing transformation in 1847, when the nation’s most popular literary character freely admitted that he had become a greedy, cynical killer. Soon enough this beloved American hero, whose name was synonymous with Yankee Doodle, would threaten to stage a military coup to seize the Capitol and overthrow Congress! Readers of the Early American Newspapers archive can follow along, gleaning important hints to decoding contemporary political rhetoric.”
—Aaron McLean Winter, National Tsing Hua University

“We are avid users of Early American Newspapers for our research on the Jefferson Papers and have been thrilled by its increased accessibility in a digital edition. Early American Newspapers has been of enormous value to us.” 
—Martha J. King, Ph.D., Associate Editor, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Princeton University

“Readex has put together a wondrous, easy-to-search database from the world’s most important repositories of early American newspapers. Historians and other scholars who want to shave years off their research would do well to ask their college or university to purchase it.”
—Robert L. Paquette, Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History, Hamilton College

“My students are ecstatic about Readex’s digital Early American Newspapers. I’m delighted too, remembering the many hours I spent squinting over a microcard reader as I researched what became my first published article. At the time, I considered it a miracle that my small state university had a microcard reader, even though in summer condensation on the glass produced even deeper fog than the words themselves. Digitization will help democratize scholarship, but in the right hands it will also produce more thorough and imaginative research.”
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Phillips Professor of Early American History, Harvard University

“How jealous I am of the students who will be able to use this wonderful resource! The digital version of Early American Newspapers gives them an unfair advantage over all previous generations of scholars who had to spend months or even years seeking-and perhaps never finding-what can now be found with a few keystrokes. One five-minute search on ‘Washington Irving’ made visions of an article dance before my eyes. I turned up not only reviews of his works and accounts of his travels, but an article about the controversy surrounding Irving’s selection to a committee charged with designing a memorial to Shakespeare in London. (‘It does appear,’ wrote a London editor, ‘that a national monument could have been raised to Shakspeare without selecting as a Committee-man, a member of a republic which has denationalized itself.’) Who knew?”
—Benjamin Reiss, Associate Professor of English, Tulane University

“Digital Early American Newspapers is extremely valuable for scholars, teachers and students. I was able to search for specific individuals, commodities and objects, helping me to complete a study of one product and its distribution and consumption in America. Before this digitization, time would not permit me to search for goods of a certain name and merchants of a particular firm. Nor could I before scan across cities in search of specific debates on specific topics. For an American Revolution course I teach, I am now able to present in my lectures and handouts information on how debates over, for example, luxury ramified and endured after the 1780s and early 1790s.

“Early American Newspapers also allows more effective research by my students on course-essay topics, such as one paper on the fear of piracy in the late 18th century. For certain subjects in material, economic and literary history, extracting needles from haystacks is key, and this digital collection will offer that ability. I especially like that it will allow graduate students to break their current focus on the Middle Colonies and States, rerouting attention to other cities and problems and facilitating previously difficult cross-urban comparisons.”
—David Hancock, Professor; Director, Atlantic Studies Initiative, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

“With its digital Early American Newspapers collection, Readex has produced an excellent new resource. A religion department colleague has found articles that he did not know existed about an obscure Protestant sect he’s studying. I’ve been able to continue work in the ‘Massachusetts Spy’ that I’d had to set aside for lack of time to visit the microfilm reader, and a graduate student studying women criminals has been able to vastly expand her research base. We are all very impressed. This Web-based archive is a beaut!”
—Woody Holton, Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

“The Early American Newspapers database is a digital miracle that will revolutionize the way in which scholars conceive of and undertake research. Ideas buried in crumbling and hard-to-find newspapers are now available with the click of a mouse. Not only is it possible to identify the emergence of ideas within specific texts and contexts, but it is now also practical, for the first time, to trace their diffusion through space and time, identifying plagiarisms, noting piracies, documenting permutations and revealing the structure of hitherto invisible networks of communication.”
—Leon Jackson, Associate Professor of English, University of South Carolina

“The Readex digital Early American Newspapers (1690-1876) will revolutionize the way American history is taught and studied. Until now, only an intrepid few scholars have mined these phenomenal resources. The absence of any easily used indexes, the tedium of endless hours before the microfilm reader, and the simple scarcity of some of these primary sources has made truly comprehensive work in early American newspapers extremely difficult.

“With this new on-line resource, scholars and students alike will be able to easily and efficiently search these texts. And they will be able to do so in a way hitherto only dreamed of. Instead of focusing on modest runs, perhaps several years, of a very limited number of papers, they will now be able to search decades of a much larger variety of newspapers. If the recent work of researchers such as Jeffrey L. Pasley and David Waldstreicher is any indication, the yield of this new research will be monumental. We will have a whole new sense of exactly what it was early Americans knew about themselves and their world. For the first time, students too will be able to explore once pedestrian documents in ways never before possible. Imagine a research project on Jefferson’s first inauguration in which students can easily survey dozens of newspaper accounts. The possibilities boggle the mind.”
—Edward G. Gray, Professor of History, Florida State University

“Digital Early American Newspapers will revolutionize research in early American history by allowing full-text searches of a huge and constantly growing number of early newspapers ranging over centuries of time and the whole of the nation. No indexes exist for these materials. In the past, one had to pick a specific paper in a specific time and place and simply slog through it. It could easily take a couple days to thoroughly read one year of one daily newspaper, with no guarantee that anything related to one’s research question would be found. The process then had to be repeated paper after paper, year after year. Because of the low signal-to-noise ratio and the intense physical demands (on the eyesight especially) of this sort of research, many scholars and most students of early American history have avoided newspapers if they could, even though newspapers are by far the most extensive and useful source available on many political, cultural, and economic topics. The wide dissemination of the Early American Newspapers database should change all that.”
“Now research projects that once took weeks will be performed in an afternoon. New historical interpretations will arise in many areas simply because more historians will be able find out for the first time what was in the periodical press. In addition, the research capacities and consequent professional development of students will greatly expand.”
—Jeffrey L. Pasley, Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri-Columbia

“Explore your early American ancestors and the America of yesterday!… A new invaluable resource…. Based largely on Clarence Brigham’s ‘History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820,’ this collection offers a fully text-searchable database of over one million pages, including cover-to-cover reproductions of historic newspapers! It contains a comprehensive listing of marriage, death, and court records found in early American periodicals such as the Boston Gazette, Gazette of the United States, New York Evening Post, and many more. For genealogists and scholars alike, Early American Newspapers, 1690-1876, offers an unprecedented look back into the extraordinary past of the United States!”
—The New England Historic Genealogical Society Web Site

“An essential source for early Americanists now available in a user-friendly format. Makes research for scholars and students much easier and more rewarding.”
—Graham Hodges, George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History, Colgate University