Chronicling America Digitized Newspapers
The Arkansas Digital Newspaper Project (ADNP) has digitized over 300,000 pages of newspaper content as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) and is currently working on digitizing an additional 100,000 pages as part of our fourth grant cycle (2023-2025). All content digitized as part of this program is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through a partnership with the Library of Congress. The digitized newspapers are available on the Library of Congress website as part of the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection. Chronicling America contains digitized historic newspapers from the 1700s through 1963, with newspapers from all 50 states and some U.S. territories.
View all of our digitized newspaper titles on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection here.
2023 Recipient of the Arkansas Historical Association's Diamond Award for "expanding access to historical sources through its participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program."
Project Timeline
In 2017, ASA was awarded a two-year grant (2017-2019) to select, duplicate, and digitize historic Arkansas newspapers with a goal of producing 100,000 pages of content for the Chronicling America website. By the end of the first cycle, ASA had digitized 100,630 pages from 40 newspaper titles representing 15 counties in the state.
In 2019, ASA was once again awarded a second two-year grant (2019-2021) which added an additional 20 newspaper titles representing 13 Arkansas counties for a total of 199,299 pages added to the Chronicling America website.
In 2021, ASA was awarded a third grant (2021-2023) to fund an additional 100,000 pages of content. The emphasis on newspaper title selection for this cycle is focused on underrepresented communities including female-owned and operated papers, minority-owned papers, and foreign language papers.
In August, 2023 ASA was awarded funding for an additional cycle of the grant. This cycle will begin on September 1, 2023 and end August 31, 2025. In this cycle the team will focus on newspaper titles that demonstrate the evolving relationship between the economy and the environment, from Arkansas's territorial period from 1819 to the mid-1930s.
Some of the Arkansas titles added to Chronicling America include Woman's Chronicle, Arkansas Ladies' Journal, Little Rock Ladies' Journal, Rural and Workman and "Ladies Little Rock Journal", Southern Ladies' Journal, Arkansas State Press, Arkansas Echo, Stuttgart Germania and the De Queen Bee.
Visit our digital collections page to access research guides, lesson plans, topic guides, newspaper activities and more.
View all of our digitized newspaper titles on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection here.
If you are interested in learning more about this project or would like additional resources for using Chronicling America for your own personal research or research in the classroom, please contact us at state.archives@arkansas.gov.