loc-search

Library of Congress

One API with no key over each item that the Library of Congress digitised and transcribed: newspapers from 1736 to 1963, digitised books, and manuscript collections. Each item has a full-text index, and each item resolves to the individual page.

Use it for the American part of a career — the tour circuit, local notices, and articles that explain methods. It is the counterpart to Gallica and ANNO. Two properties make it different:

• It is not only newspapers. The books and the manuscripts are in the same index, and they search in the same way. Thus the conjuring literature and the personal papers come back together with the press. A search of everything is the default, and --collection is how you make the search narrow.
• It is not only English. The newspaper corpus holds many languages. The American immigrant press published in more languages than most national archives hold.

Coverage by language

The pages in the newspaper collection, from its own language facet:

Each language searches in the same way. The community that came to a performance in the United States wrote about the performer, so the Spanish, Polish and Yiddish press are not a small detail. Frequently they hold a notice that the English papers did not print.

The shape of each decade is very different for each language, and it decides if a subset is worth a search. Each column sums to the total for that language exactly, so these are counts and not estimates: