"Chronicling America" Website Launch
National Newspaper Association Annual Meeting
Library of Congress — Washington, DC
March 21, 2007
(As Prepared for Delivery)
Good evening, and thank you, John, for that kind introduction. I'm honored to join my colleagues at the Library of Congress in welcoming the National Newspaper Association to Washington for their annual meeting. I am also pleased to see Members of Congress, scholars, librarians, and many other friends and readers of newspapers with us tonight.
I've got a confession to make …. I, too, was once in the newspaper businesses, but only as a very small business man. More decades ago than I care to recall, I delivered the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This was a tough job — trudging up steep driveways in the arctic winter of Cleveland, the fear of dogs, imagined and real, always ready to take a bite out of a carrier. And the customers could be fearsome too, if they didn't get their papers on time. They valued their newspapers and could be extremely put out if I was just a tad late. This early experience gave me an understanding of just how important newspapers are.
The distinguished publisher Philip Graham once called newspapers "the first rough draft of history." That's an apt definition. And for more than two decades, the National Endowment for the Humanities has been saving that history through the United States Newspaper Program — preserving our historic newspapers on microfilm — 70 million pages of them.
A few years ago, we realized that the future of newspaper preservation would be a digital one. So in 2004, we joined our partners at the Library of Congress to launch the National Digital Newspaper Program. Building on the accomplishments of the U.S. Newspaper Program, this new effort set an ambitious goal — to make available online, fully searchable, digital files of historic American newspapers, from every state and territory, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Much hard work has gone into this project, and tonight, NEH and the Library of Congress are proud to present to the American public the first results of these labors — the "Chronicling America" website [http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/ ]. This first version of the site contains more than two-hundred and twenty thousand pages of public domain newspapers from six states and the District of Columbia, published between 1900 and 1910. Ultimately, over the next two decades, "Chronicling America" will make more than 30 million pages of historic American newspapers available to the public — for free, and forever.
Why are we saving these newspapers and making them available this way? Because a democracy like ours is only as good as the knowledge of its citizens. The more we remember our past, the stronger we are. Yet tests and surveys continue to show that our citizens, especially our young people, exhibit an alarming lack of knowledge about America's history.
NEH is addressing this crisis of "American Amnesia" through our We the People program. The "Chronicling America" website is a key part of this broader effort. It will give students, teachers, parents, scholars, and historians access to documents that can help bring history alive for today's citizens. It is one thing to read about past events from the perspective of historians, narrated with the value of hindsight. It is entirely different to experience the story as it happened — the news, before it was "History." These newspapers give us an eyewitness account — a sense of how it really felt to live through great events like the San Francisco earthquake or the Battle of Gettysburg.
But these newspapers tell us more. They give us what lies beneath the headlines — the ordinary daily record of life. In their pages, you can read about weddings and births, about McGuffey spellers for sale, about gossip, about what people were wearing and eating and drinking — about almost everything. Newspapers give us a glimpse of the economic, political, commercial, and social aspects of our country — a view that offers both the details and the panorama.
NEH is proud to play a role in bringing this valuable historical resource to all Americans. I want to thank Librarian Billington and the Library of Congress, and our other valued partners in this worthwhile endeavor. And I thank those of you in the newspaper business today, for your ongoing contributions to the "first rough draft" of our great national story.
I hope all of you enjoy tonight's demonstration of the website, and the rest of your evening. Thank you.