REL 328: U.S. Catholic Experience

Produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), this website archives information about historic newspapers from across the United States and between 1756 to 1963. A variety of search options are available, including by state, ethnicity, language, newspaper title, or date of publication. Each digitized page may be viewed as an image or text in the browser, or it may be downloaded in PDF or JPG.

This full-text searchable newspaper database includes Catholic publications from around the United States from 1832 to the present. In addition to newspapers with a national perspective, there are also newspapers from the diocese of Pittsburgh and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Newark, Saint Louis, Harford, Miami, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The Archive is a project of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), an alliance of archives and libraries collaborating in support of the mission to provide access to Catholic research resources.

This fully-searchable collection of 280+ historical newspapers from across the United States published by and for African Americans is a one-of-a-kind record of African American history and culture. Each newspaper issue in this collection has been fully digitized and is fully searchable, including all articles, obituaries, advertisements, editorials, and illustrations. Some of the major titles in the collection include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN). The oldest newspaper dates to 1842. Try the new Text Explorer to visualize data using methods such as term clustering, frequencies, trends, and more.

This primary source collection offers a window into centuries of African American history, culture, and daily life, as well as the ways the dominant culture has portrayed and perceived people of African descent, from 1704 to today. Content is sourced from 19,000+ American and global news sources, including 400+ current and historical Black publications from pre-Revolution to the modern era. This collection covers many topical categories such as slavery and flights to freedom, voting rights and voter suppression and disenfranchisement, segregation and civil rights, prejudice and discrimination and activism and protest movements.

This is a landmark electronic collection of approximately 100,000 pages of non-fiction writings by major American Black leaders—teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures—covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be Black in America. Browse primary sources from the Vietnam War, the US Civil Rights Movement, the US Civil War, the Watergate Scandal, Reconstruction, World Wars I & II, and many landmark and historical events. This collection contains the work of Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, as well as the complete run of the Black Panther newspaper (1966-1980), and a wide selection of abolitionists' writings from the nineteenth century.

The County and Regional Histories & Atlases: Ohio database provides access to a comprehensive collection of historical atlases, maps, and county histories covering the state of Ohio. It includes digitized versions of rare 19th and early 20th century county atlases, plat books, and local histories. Users can explore detailed township maps, city plans, and rural landowner maps that show property boundaries and landowner names. The database also contains biographical sketches of prominent citizens, business directories, and historical narratives about Ohio counties and communities. This resource is invaluable for genealogists, historians, and researchers studying Ohio's local history and development. The digitized materials offer high-quality scans of original documents, allowing users to examine intricate map details and read historical accounts. With its extensive coverage of Ohio counties, this database serves as a crucial tool for understanding the state's geographical, social, and economic evolution over time.

This database provides access to 40,000+ detailed maps and large-scale lithographed street plans of Ohio cities drawn by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company between 1882 and 1962. Sanborn maps are valuable for historical research into urban geography and documenting changes in the built environment of American cities over many decades. The maps include outlines of each building and outbuilding; the location of windows and doors; street names; street and sidewalk widths; property boundaries; fire walls; natural features (rivers, canals, etc.); railroad corridors; building use (sometimes even particular room uses); house and block number; as well as the composition of building materials including the framing, flooring, and roofing materials; the strength of the local fire department; indications of sprinkler systems; locations of fire hydrants; location of water and gas mains; and even the names of most public buildings, churches and businesses.