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Vanished South Dakota: Mining the Newspaper Archives

Daily Press and Dakotaian 1875

Newspapers have been a source of new information since the founding of our country. And thanks to a massive digitization project through the Library of Congress, they have become a source of past information as well.

Chronicling America is a website that houses digitized newspapers from across the United States in a searchable database. It is produced the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) which is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC). A third round of funding for the project was released in 2018 with $280,200 awarded to the South Dakota State Historical Society. That money, in turn, has been used to digitize several historic South Dakota newspapers held on microfilm in the organization's archives. This week, several of those papers became available on the Chronicling America website.

The new titles currently available are:

Union County Courier of Elk Point, 1877-1913

Madison Daily Leader, 1890-1922

Newell Reclamation News, 1915-1917

Bad River News, 1906-1912

Philip Weekly Review, 1907-1912

Philip Weekly Review and Bad River News, 1912-1918

The Pioneer, 1917-1919

Philip Weekly Review 1918-1920

The Pioneer-Review, 1920-1922

The Oglala Light of Pine Ridge, 1905-1920

Sturgis Advertiser, 1887-1891

Dewey County Advocate of Timber Lake, 1910-1913

The Charles Mix New Era, 1905-1911

The New Era-Leader, 1911-1912

The Wagner Leader, 1912

The entire collection is searchable and available free to the public at this link.