Chronicling America Maps and Visualizations

Originally published September 2022 · pp. 24–25

Chronicling America Maps and Visualizations — lead photograph from the original article

In previous installments of this column, researchers have read about various Civil Warera newspapers now digitized and available via different websites. One of the best just got even better! The Library of Congress (LOC), through the ‘Chronicling America’ collection, now provides visual aids for navigating almost 20 million newspaper pages. https://tinyurl. com/yckzvdwu. As the LOC suggests, review the “…links and descriptions to several different types of interactive maps, graphs, and charts designed to assist users in better understanding the scope and coverage of newspapers in Chronicling America.” This writer selected ‘Chronicling America Temporal Coverage by State (Map)’ in this example https://tinyurl.com/ mpsk8wfr.

See (Map) image. Next, select the ‘View the Interactive visualization’ link. Click and drag on the graph, as shown in the graph image, to choose the years 1861-1865. Next, right-click these selected years and click the line image beside ‘exclude.’ A ‘Full Data’ window will open, as shown below. Click ‘Full Data’ to retrieve all the specific newspaper stats from the LOC. Three columns appear in the next window: year, state, and count (newspaper issues). Researchers can sort any of the three columns in ascending or descending order. For this exercise, the writer sorted newspaper issues in descending order of quantity of issues at LOC (click next to the column headings to sort). ‘Chronicling America’ collection at https:// chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.

Full Data window.

Sorted newspaper issues by state and year.

Chronicling America Maps and Visualizations — photograph 2 from the original article

Chronicling America Temporal Coverage by State (Map).

Sorted newspaper issues by quantity at Library of Congress.

Graph.

Until next month, continued luck in researching the primary sources from the American Civil War! Michael K. Shaffer is a Civil War historian, author, lecturer, and instructor, who remains a member of the Society of Civil War Historians, Historians of the Civil War Western Theater, and the Georgia Association of Historians. Readers may contact him at [email protected] or request speaking engagements at www.civilwarhistorian. net. Follow Michael on Facebook, www.facebook.com/ michael.k.shaffer, and Twitter @ michaelkshaffer.