Orientation slides (presentation recording; passcode: 2h4V%+D^)
Selection survey (due May 15)
Rowell's & Ayer's American Newspaper Directories
Note: Information in these annual directories is often based on data collected the previous year. For example, the 1898 directory is likely listing 1897 facts and may already be out-of-date.
Previous round title lists (all title list)
The growing democratization of American print journalism in the twentieth century resulted in newspaper publications from an increasingly varied chorus of voices in Georgia. The Digital Library of Georgia proposes to digitize newspaper titles by and for the state’s underrepresented communities to better contextualize Georgia's history during the South’s hard-fought transition to a more egalitarian society. Digitizing newspapers from these marginalized groups will not only help fill gaps in the history of our nation, but it will also help meet the research demands of an increasingly changing country. In addition, the increasing impact of global warming in the 21st century has led to the rapid growth of environmental history studies in the last few decades. Many of Georgia’s rural newspapers provide detailed coverage of the human impact on the state’s natural resources and the aftermath of environmental disasters on Georgia’s residents. The DLG proposes to contribute to the body of primary resources available on the subject by including several key newspaper titles in its selection list.
During the early 20th century several Georgia women were trailblazers in the field of print journalism, but they also worked tirelessly for societal progress with an intensity not often found in their male counterparts. Very little has been written about their accomplishments, and their newspapers are not currently available online for research. In the preeminent books on Georgia newspaper history, Georgia Journalism by Louis Turner Griffith and John Erwin Talmadge and The Last Linotype by Millard B. Grimes, there are very few pages reserved for the contributions of women to the field. Their inclusion in Chronicling America would help fill gaps in our understanding of the South in the mid-twentieth century by bringing to light voices that have largely been hidden from scholars.
Black entrepreneurs diversified the perspectives of Georgia’s newspaper press after the Civil War. Throughout the state, publishers established newspapers that reported on the lives of the Black citizenry that were almost completely ignored by the white press. This work stretched beyond well-known publications like the Savannah Tribune and Atlanta Daily World, unfortunately, university librarians and archivists failed to preserve many of these smaller newspaper titles with the same voracity as they did white-owned papers of record. Alex Lichtenstein, author of the foreword to Journalism and Jim Crow highlights the need to provide more access to the Southern Black press. “Uncovering extant copies of the South’s Black newspapers of the Jim Crow era, and making them more widely available, remains an important task for scholars, librarians, and archivists.” (xxii).
Savannah has been the home to a significant Jewish community since Georgia’s colonial period. The Savannah Jewish News (1949-1963), published by the Savannah Jewish Federation, covered the news of the city’s Jewish population in the mid-twentieth century, including the postwar impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people and the effects of anti-semitism in the American South. If selected for digitization, these papers would represent the first Jewish newspaper from Georgia in Chronicling America.
The Warm Springs Advertiser/Mirror (1930-1954) uniquely covered local and national news related to people with disabilities. After Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the area in 1924, he was convinced of the healing powers of the springs and helped establish a rehabilitation center for polio patients and other people with disabilities. The nation’s first president with physical disabilities made his second home in Warm Springs and the local paper detailed his involvement in improving services for visitors from across the country. This is one of the very few newspapers published by a disabled community, and would be the first in Chronicling America.
Several newspaper titles under consideration in this grant cycle document the damaging environmental impact of growth on Georgia’s landscape and the efforts by its citizens to reverse that damage. Twentieth-century Georgia was grappling with a burgeoning industrial economy, natural disasters, the collapse of cotton agriculture as substandard farming practices and a boll weevil infestation forced the state to reassess its relationship with the environment. Making these papers available will give researchers a better understanding of the history of the environment and climate change.