Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America

I just spent the day introducing 3-5 graders in Helena's gifted and talented program to our digitized newspaper collections. It was exhausting. (I'm in awe of those of you who do this every day.) And it reinforced my belief there are few sources more fascinating than historic newspapers.

In the past, we've asked students engaged in research projects to jump right into the digitized newspaper collections. It mostly didn't work. Because only a small portion of our collections are digitized, students aren't guaranteed to find material on their topic. And, more importantly, searching is a learned skill. So this time, we waded in slowly.

I started by showing a printed front page from the Montana Post (Montana's first newspaper). We talked about how it differed from newspapers today and speculated on why that was so.

Students then played "newspaper bingo," using other pages I had printed out from various Montana newspapers. (In choosing which pages to print, I made sure the newspaper name and publication date was on the page and I leaned toward pages with lots of advertisements, since those are less intimidating.) To save time, reduce frustration, and keep students' looking more broadly at the paper instead of searching only for specific topics, I defined bingo as completing any four squares on their card (they didn't have to be in a row).*

We then went from printed pages to the computer to go shopping. I first had the students share some of the things they would like to get as a present. We talked about whether those items would have been available in 1900. Then we  "stepped into our time machines" (the Chronicling America web page) to travel back in time to shop for gifts.** This shopping activity fascinated students, and it taught them how to limit a search to a particular span of years and state. It also introduced the idea of delimiting searches by using the "all the words" feature.

After we shared what we "bought", we talked a little about the different ways to search ("any of the words," "all the words," "within five words").

As time permitted, students also traveled back in time to investigate what was going on in the world 100 years before they were born. For this exercise they chose a specific date (their birth date minus 100 years.) Some chose to refine their search by looking in a specific state but most just entered the date range, hit search, and then started browsing.

By this time, they were much more comfortable navigating the online newspaper collections than they had been when we started. They knew a little about searching and also how to enlarge and navigate around specific pages so they could read various articles.

Finally, we talked about using the newspapers for research projects, including the fact that Montana has newspapers on two different sites and that there is no overlap between sites. We talked about how to figure out whether digitized newspapers existed for the time period the event you were researching occurred. Montana Newspapers has 382,000 full-text searchable pages from 54 newspapers (1885-2014) while Chronicling America has 257,000 pages from 59 Montana newspapers (1864-1922)--and many more pages from newspapers across the country. Logically, then, if you are researching the 1959 Hegben earthquake, you'll have better luck looking in Montana Newspapers for stories.  

Only a few of the students had time to actually conduct newspaper research while I was with them, but I'm pleased to say they were successful--much more so than other students we'd tried to introduce to the online newspaper collections. My teacher friends tell me it's all about scaffolding. I'm glad I finally listened!


*Billings librarian Ruth Ferris came up with both newspaper bingo and the shopping activity as part of larger units: "Thinking Like a Historian: Using Digital Newspapers in the Classroom"  and Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study Guide (by Cheryl Hughes). Thanks, Ruth!

**My colleague Zoe Ann Stoltz often says that the historic newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine, so I borrowed that analogy. Kids really liked buckling up in their time machines and/or climbing into their "tardis."

Ten new MT newspapers on Chronicling America!

As Zoe Ann Stoltz, MHS Reference Historian, is fond of saying, “newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine.” That’s why I love the National Digitization Newspaper Program.

Montana newspapers available through Chronicling America

Library staff have been hard at work digitizing some of our historic newspaper collection. We now have sample issues (and a few full runs) digitized from 36 different Montana newspapers. Our total page count is now 127,664, distributed across 17,197 issues. A full list of Montana newspapers currently digitized is available here.

Most recently, ten new titles have been added:

• Butte Inter Mountain
• Culbertson Searchlight
• New North-west (Deer Lodge)
• Malta Enterprise
• Producers News (Plentywood)
• The River Press (Fort Benton)
• Rocky Mountain Husbandman (Diamond City)
• Ronan Pioneer
• Suffrage News (Helena)
• Sun River Sun

The Missoulian run has grown from one to five years (1909-14), and the Helena Independent now has continuous coverage from 1889 through 1894. Brief abstracts for the titles are available here. 

Other states’ newspapers available through Chronicling America

Looking for newspapers outside of Montana? Thirty-six states and Puerto Rico are also actively digitizing their newspapers. See all of the papers available through the Chronicling America Website (and remember, the site is regularly adding more titles).

Lesson Ideas Using Chronicling America

Looking for ideas of how to use these in the classroom? Here are a few hints:

• Ask students: What was happening on your birthday 100 or 75 years ago? 
• Play “newspaper bingo” to explore the social world of the era you are studying (Sample bingo cards and instructions are available here.) 
• Have students go shopping in the ads to answer the question “what can I buy now, what could I buy then”?
• Have students research how newspapers of the time portrayed certain significant events (See this useful post on conducting advance searches on the Chronicling America website.)
• Use our lesson plan, “Thinking Like a Historian,” to have students explore what life was like in Virginia City, Montana, by conducting newspaper research. 
• Compare events as described in a reminiscence, letter, or other source to the account of the same event in the newspaper (see our page 21 of our study guide for Girl from the Gulches: the Story of Mary Ronan, for an example). 
• Have students write up a column to be published in your local newspaper or radio station, “This Week in Montana History” (hat tip to Renee Rasmussen, who did something like this with her Chester High School English students.) 

Looking for even more ideas? Edsitement has more suggestions for you.

Other Sources for Newspapers

I like Chronicling America because its interface is the most friendly and it is (relatively) easy to search. But if your students are conducting local history projects, and the newspapers you want are NOT available through Chronicling America, they might still be able to find relevant articles through other sources. A list of freely available digitized Montana newspapers is here.

In addition, the Montana Historical Society has 95% of all the newspapers ever published in Montana on microfilm. Your library can interlibrary loan up to five reels of microfilm for thirty days at a time.

Historic newspapers are the bomb-diggity!

Longtime readers may be tired of hearing me say this (for example here and here), but there's nothing like reading a historic newspaper to get a glimpse into the past.

Sure newspapers reflect the biases of their times and their editors, who chose what to cover based on what they thought their subscribers (and political bosses) wanted to read. Case in point: When I was researching the book I wrote about weddings, I looked in vain for articles in towns that had huge immigrant communities (Lewistown and Roundup, among others) for articles announcing immigrant weddings (and describing the festivities). I finally figured out that Croatians, Germans, and other non-English speakers didn't subscribe to English language newspapers, so there was no incentive to the editor to cover their events! Finding balanced historical coverage about Montana Indians is also next to impossible. And yet...

Newspapers are great for glimpsing the details of daily life--to discover the available food and technology, learn what people did for fun, explore fashion or types of work, and investigate coverage of local, national, and world events.

All of which to say, hurrah for my colleagues in the Newspaper Digitization Project, who have put over 950,000 pages of newspapers online for you to search and browse on the websites MONTANA NEWSPAPERS and CHRONICLING AMERICA. The newest additions include more issues of the Grass Range Review (now available from 1912-1932 on Montana Newspapers) and  these titles on Chronicling America:

• The Bozeman Courier (1920-1927)
• The Fort Peck Press (1934-1937)
• The Glasgow Courier (1942-1945)
• The Kevin Courier (5/5/1922-8/23/1922)
• The Montana Courier (8/30/1922-9/20/1922)
• The Kevin Review (9/27/1922-12/25/1924)
• Laurel Outlook (1944-1950)
• The Wolf Point Herald (1920-1932)

Happy surfing!


P.S. 950,000 pages seems like a lot, and it is! But there even more newspapers aren't available digitally than are so don't be surprised if you don't find your town or specific dates you are looking for (know too additional papers are available from other sites but that they, unlike Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America, charge a subscription fee.).

P.P.S. Do you use historic newspapers with your students? If so, tell me how!

More digitized Montana newspapers now online

The Montana Historical Society is pleased to announce that new content is available to search and browse on the web site MONTANA NEWSPAPERS.

Several newspapers from Thompson Falls, including the SANDERS COUNTY LEDGER, DEMOCRAT, and SIGNAL (1905-24), are online.

The FLATHEAD COURIER (Polson) boasts a 70-year run, from 1910 to 1980.

From the town of Moore, Montana, you’ll find THE INLAND EMPIRE (1905-15) and THE MOORE INDEPENDENT (1921-31).

We’ve also added three special editions:

• The GREAT FALLS LEADER ANNUAL of 1890 was designed to be distributed outside of Montana in an effort to attract settlers and investment to the region.
• The 1899 souvenir edition of THE BUTTE MINER honored Montana troops who served in the Spanish–American War.
• The 84-page GREAT FALLS EVENING LEADER RECLAMATION EDITION (1907) promoted irrigation projects, towns, and industry across north central Montana.

Montana Newspapers is one of two online repositories of digitized Montana newspapers. The other is Chronicling America, which includes both newspapers from Montana and ones from around the country. Find a list of the Montana papers available through Montana Newspapers here, and a separate list of the Montana papers available through Chronicling American here. (Note that there is no overlap between the two sites.) Or check out this map, that shows the papers' geographic distribution. 

Want ideas for using the digitized newspapers in your classroom? Check out these earlier posts: 

• Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America
• Using Historic Newspapers to Increase Student Understanding of World War I
• Resources to Help You Use Chronicling America

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Thanks to the hard work of my colleague, Natasha Hollenbach, the Montana Historical Society is pleased to announce that new content is available to search and browse on the web site MONTANA NEWSPAPERS. 

The following newspapers have been added.

• Fallon County Times (2010-2013) with the sponsorship of the Fallon County Library with the permission of Country Media, Inc.
• Hardin Tribune/Hardin Tribune-Herald (1907-1927) with the sponsorship of the Big Horn County Historical Museum
• Fergus County Argus (1907-1910) with the sponsorship of the Lewistown Public Library
• Fergus County Democrat (1917-1919) with the sponsorship of the Lewistown Public Library.

These new additions put Montana Newspapers at over half a million searchable pages. The titles join issues from 71 other newspapers (1883-2015) at Montana Newspapers AND an additional 257,000 pages from 59 Montana newspapers (1864-1922), which can be found on Chronicling America. 

Both Chronicling America and Montana Newspapers are freely accessible to all Internet users; no subscriptions or fees are required. 

Intrigued? Here's a map of all of the Montana newspapers that have been digitized. Here's the portal for both collections.  And here are some suggestions for using the digitized newspaper collections in your classroom. 

My coworker Zoe Ann Stoltz is fond of saying that newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. I encourage you (and your students) to board your Tardis, strap on your seatbelt, and take a trip back in time--to Lewistown on September 6, 1917, Dillon on December 8, 1941, or to another place and date of your choosing.

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all! 

Using Historic Newspapers to Increase Student Understanding of World War I

At MEA-MFT in October, my colleague Natasha Hollenbach offered a presentation on using digitized historic newspapers to conduct research on World War I. She graciously agreed to share some of that information to the list.

While she focused on World War I, you can adapt many of the skills and strategies to other events.  Also while primarily focused on history classes, several of these ideas could be used for English, debate, or civics classes. 

The Montana Historical Society currently has 536,000 pages of historical newspapers available online, either through Chronicling America and Montana Newspapers. This is less than 5 percent of our overall collection but still a useful resource for researchers and teachers. Here’s Natasha:

The front page of the September 27, 1918, issue of the Roundup Record is an excellent example of the types of World War I content found in newspapers.  Covering everything from the battles at the front, deaths and promotions of local soldiers, liberty loans, the influenza epidemic, various aspects of the draft, and even fluff stories (in this case a photo of a French soldier having his first American donut), newspapers like this one provide a wealth of information.

Often students complain that they don’t like history because to them it’s just memorizing dates, people, and events.  But that’s not history.  History is the personal stories of how individuals or communities created and dealt with events of their time.  Below are some sample searches and suggested techniques for moving students to a new understanding of history.

Immigrants and the War

For example, some textbook descriptions about US entry into World War I often include discussion of German (and other) immigrants’ opposition to US entry, and these often suggest that they were more loyal to their native country than to their adopted one.  In response, I recommend the article “Montana Boy to Fight His Father in the Trenches," Ronan Pioneer, September 14, 1917, p.4.

Have your students write a reaction.  How would it make them feel to realize that they would be fighting a war opposite their father, brother, cousins, and/or friends?  How would that affect their attitude on US entry?  What is the impact of the tension between personal loyalties and national allegiance? How does this article confirm or contradict textbook views of immigrants and the war? And why do they think the newspaper published this story? Solely as human interest? Or was there a political agenda?

Jeannette Rankin

One of Montana’s most famous World War I stories is Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin’s vote against the war. To find articles describing her vote, I limiting the date range of my search to April 6, 1917-April 13, 1917 (the week after her vote) and then searched Jeanette Rankin “as a phrase”.  I could have limited it to Montana also, but I was interested in national coverage of the event.

Below are links to a number of results.

• Columbus Commercial (Mississippi), April 8, 1917, p, 2.
• “2,000,000 Men in 2 Years.” Topeka State Journal, April 6, 1917, p, 1.
• Ward County Independent (North Dakota), April 12, 1917, p, 2
• “Most Dramatic Congress Scene in U.S. History.” Harrisburg Telegraph (Pennsylvania), April 6, 1917, p. 8.
• “Woman Votes No.” Free Trader-Journal (Illinois), April 6, 1917, p. 3.
• “By a Vote of Three Hundred Seventy-Three to Fifty The House Casts Lot With The Powers of the Entente”. Hawaiian Gazette, April 6, 1917, p. 1.
• “Dramatic Scene.” Daily Gate City and Constitution-Democrat (Iowa), April 6, 1917, p. 1.

Ask your students: Which articles do they find more convincing?  What details differ between articles?  What opinion on women’s suffrage do you think the newspaper supports and why?  How is the attitude towards the vote different than what students have been exposed to before this (contemporary coverage was generally much more negative than we view her vote today) and why is it different?

If you teach English/writing, perhaps you could use these articles to examine how word choice affects meaning and to illustrate different writing tones.  Several of these articles clearly came from the same source but have been slightly changed. How do those changes affect how the article’s tone?

Liberty Loans

The National History Day 2017 Themebook includes a list of ten strategies for using digitized newspapers, including two involving advertisements.  (For the full list, see pages 65.) Both work well for Liberty Loan advertisements.  To find these ads, set the date range for 1917-1919 and search liberty loan “as a phrase”.  Even limiting the search to Montana will return a lot of hits.  Looking through them, choose a few that are full page ads.  The liberty loan ads are both fascinating and slightly terrifying.  They have this overall feel that their motto is “give until it hurts … and then give more”.  

Consider paring one of the ads with the article that ran in the Columbia Falls Columbian, April 11, 1918.  The story, which talks about volunteers going house to house collecting money, includes this line: “while it has been estimated what each person should subscribe, there is nothing to prevent an over-subscription, neither will the party … be told what his allotment is, but he will be asked to subscribe for as much as he cares to, and if the sum does not equal the figure estimated to be his share, the matter will be taken up in a different way.” There are so many things you could talk about with this:  privacy, peer pressure, big data and how it’s used, and official intimidation/coercion to name a few.

Sedition

Lastly, instead of having the newspapers as your focus, consider using them to supplement other materials.  If you haven’t looked at the Montana Sedition Project, you should. It documents the 79 Montanans convicted of sedition in 1918-19. Consider having your students conduct a simulation. Assign a different person to pairs of students (one to argue for convicting the person and the other to argue against).  Have them use the newspapers both to find out generally what was considered sedition and how it was discussed and to see if they can find information specifically about their person.  I did a quick search for the individuals listed on the Sedition Project’s “Selected Profiles” page and I found all but one of them (Janet Smith) in Montana Newspapers (which seemed to have better results than Chronicling America, but I recommend students checking both).  I found the coverage of Ben Kahn particularly compelling.  Compare how they describe what he said over these three articles.

• “STOP! LOOK AND LISTEN!” Big Timber Pioneer, May 9, 1918, p. 4.
• “Sedition Act Up To Supreme Court”. Choteau Montanan, May 9, 1919, p. 5.
• “Clemency Is Urged In Kahn Sedition Matter.” Dillon Tribune, December 17, 1920, p. 4.

Newspapers can be a fabulous resource for you and your students so I hoped I sparked some inspiration for how you can incorporate them into your classroom.  When you do, please let us know what you did and how it worked out.

EVERYBODY loves historic newspapers

Digitized Newspapers

I am always excited when my coworker Natasha Hollenbach tells me that she's completed uploading new newspapers to Montana Newspapers or Chronicling America. The newest additions to Montana Newspapers bring the total of free digitized pages available to over 1.15 million!

New titles/available date ranges include:

• Belt Valley Times from 1964 to 1977.
• The River Press (Fort Benton) up through 2010.
• The Poplar Shopper from 1970 to 2001 (the full run) 
• The Char-Koosta News from 1985 to 2014
• And 656 pages of 5 newspapers from Castle (all that remain): The Castle Mining Reporter, The Castle News, Castle Reporter, Castle Tribune, and The Whole Truth.

Click here for a map of all the newspapers digitized by the Montana Historical Society. Click here to access them. And click here for ideas on how to use the digitized newspapers with students.

End of Year Survey

Don't forget to complete the year-end survey. You might win a prize. You will certainly enjoy that good feeling of helping out your fellow teachers by providing feedback to make Teaching Montana History better and especially by sharing a favorite resource/go-to lesson. 

 

Travel Back in Time

I think the digitized newspapers on Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America are the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe even the best thing since before sliced bread. 

Never explored them? Stop reading RIGHT NOW (I promise, we'll be here for you to come back to), click on this map, and choose a newspaper close to where you live. Then go to an early paper published on your birthday (or during your birthday week). 

Are you back? Good! Find anything interesting? Did you get sucked into exploring? I thought so! 

The fact is, I've never met anyone--kid or adult--who didn't like to read historic newspapers. They are, as my colleague Zoe Ann Stoltz says, the closest thing we have to a time machine.

That's why I was so pleased to learn from our Digital Projects Librarian Natasha Hollenbach that the Montana Historical Society has new content available (and a total of 579,875 pages!) to search and browse on the web site Montana Newspapers: 

• The Thompson Falls Public Library has finished their huge push to make the Sander County Ledger/Sanders County Independent Ledger available. With this addition of the Sanders County Independent-Ledger (1925-1929) the whole surviving run from 1917 to 1963 is now available. Unfortunately a gap since exists from 1921 to 1924 but as far as we know no copies of these issues have survived. This particular date range is a great addition, since it was a new find which had never been microfilmed. 
• Hellgate High School has added the Hellgate Lance (1964-1982 and 2013-2017) to their previous run of 1983-2008.
• The Lewistown Public Library has made possible the addition of the Fergus County Argus (1920-1929), which adds to their contribution of Lewistown papers.
• Celebrate the addition of a new city with Grass Range Review (1917-1923), made possible by the Grass Range Community Foundation. 
• The River Press has made it possible to extend the date range for The River Press another 19 years, so 1889-1902 and 1915-1976 is now available.
• The University of Montana Western and the Dillon Public Library has added three years of the The Dillon Tribune (2013-2015). Dillon now has papers available from 1883 to 2015!

Montana Newspapers is one of two sites where Montana's digitized newspapers reside free of charge for researchers. The other is Chronicling America, where in addition to many other titles, you can find The River Press (1880-1888 and 1902-1914) and the Fergus County Argus (1886-1906). 

Looking for ideas on how to use these with your students? Here is a past post about activities I conducted with third through fifth graders in a gifted and talented class. Here's a post from Natasha on Using Historic Newspapers to Increase Student Understanding of World War I and here's yet a post on Resources to Help You Use Chronicling America. Looking for more inspiration? Edsitement has more suggestions for you.

Access over 350,000 Pages of Montana Newspapers Online

Exciting news!

The Montana Historical Society is pleased to offer a new online resource for Montana history. More than 352,000 pages from 44 Montana newspapers dated 1885-2014 are now available on [montananewspapers.org]MONTANA NEWSPAPERS, a freely accessible, full-text searchable database and web site available at this URL montananewspapers.org.

The new site, designed specifically for digitized newspapers, offers more effective search, browse, and display of newspaper content. The content in MONTANA NEWSPAPERS was previously available on the Montana Memory Project. The [montanamemory.org]Montana Memory Project continues to offer thousands of digitized photographs, manuscripts, and books related to Montana's heritage.

Funding for MONTANA NEWSPAPERS was provided by the Montana Historical Society, the Montana State Library, and libraries and other contributors across the state. Montana’s participation in Chronicling America was made possible by grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In addition to developing and publishing this new resource, the MHS is now offering a new service to the state. The Society’s Digital Services Group will work with Montana communities to digitize more of Montana’s historical newspapers. Interested parties should contact mhsdigital@mt.gov.

Extra, Extra! More Montana Newspapers Are Now Available through Chronicling America

As many of you know, Chronicling America is one of my favorite sites. The Montana Historical Society is actively digitizing Montana newspapers. The good news is that we have just added an additional 7 titles (and 25,000 pages) of historical Montana newspapers (1865-1922) to the Chronicling America web site. The new titles are:

• Great Falls Tribune, 1885-1896
• Daily Missoulian, 1909
• Harlowton News, 1909-1914
• Libby Herald, 1911-1913
• Montana Plaindealer (Helena), 1906-1911
• Philipsburg Mail, 1887-1901
• Yellowstone Monitor (Glendive), 1908-1912

This is in addition to the thousands of pages we already had posted from the Anaconda Standard, Butte New Age, Colored Citizen (Helena), Daily Yellowstone Journal (Miles City), Fergus County Argus, Mineral Argus (Maiden), Montana News (Lewistown), Helena Independent.

Every word is full-text searchable, and every page can be freely viewed, zoomed, cropped, copied, or printed. One caution—some of the pages on these new papers can be slow to load. The Library of Congress says that load times will improve as more pages are cached. (For a page to be cached, someone has to look at it first. So do your part for researchers everywhere and get exploring!)

Of course, new technology is always a little daunting, and in Chronicling America, as with all large digital collections, it can be difficult to find what you are looking for—especially at first. TPS Barat’s blog, which focuses on primary sources from the Library of Congress, has just put together a very useful post “Advanced Search Tips: Chronicling America Historic Newspapers” that can make your (and your students’) research more fruitful. 

If you are looking for even more guidance, consider using one of the lesson plans we’ve created with Billings school librarian Ruth Ferris.

“Thinking  like a Historian: Using Digital Newspapers in the Classroom”  asks students to explore daily life in Virginia City during the gold rush before the coming of the railroad, using the following essential questions: “How has life changed and how has it remained the same? How does transportation affect daily life? What would it have been like to live in Virginia City during the gold rush?”

Three additional Chronicling America lesson plans were included in the new study guide for Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan. Two of them can be adapted to use without reading the anchor text and can easily be adapted to other time periods. “What Can You Buy? What Could Mary Buy?” has students looking at advertisements today and in the 1860s, and choosing presents for themselves and their family. The second, “Found Poetry,” asks students to create a found poem, based on an article from the Montana Post.

Looking for a really simple entry into the newspapers? Ask students: What was happening on your birthday 100 or 75 years ago? Or have them play newspaper bingo.

Many other folks are also creating Chronicling America lesson plans. See here for more details.

Finding and Using Primary Sources

 One question I'm often asked is "where can I find good primary sources?" Nationally, my first stops are the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Digital Public Library of America, all of which have exhibits, curated primary source sets, and educator resources to make it easier to find useful material. For Montana, my first recommendation is always the Montana Memory Project, the Montana Historical Society, digitized newspapers, and your local museum, archives, or historical society.  

Montana Memory Project Exhibits

The Montana Memory Project has a huge number of sources--so many that it can be overwhelming. To make it easier for educators to find material, it gathered a group of classroom teachers to create primary source sets. Many of these sets are now posted on their exhibit page. Its own staff has also been creating exhibits, all of which include selected primary sources on a particular topic along with a little bit of contextual narrative. Here are a few titles that caught my eye, but there are many more--and still more being added on the Memory Project's Exhibit Page.

• Bicycles for the Army: The 25th Infantry in Montana
• Construction of the Hungry Horse Dam
• Early Schools in Montana
• Hell or High Water: Floods in Montana
• Logging History in Montana

MTHS Annotated Resource Sets

A few years ago, we created eleven annotated resource sets that include links to photographs, maps, illustrations, and documents relating to Montana history topics from the gold rush and homesteading to World War I and the Great Depression. Many, but not all, of the images linked in these sets were also used to illustrate the textbook Montana: Stories of the Land. We didn't create a set for every chapter, but we did for most of the most popular ones. 

Digitized Newspapers

My colleague, reference librarian Zoe Ann Stolz, likes to say that historic newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. The Montana Historical Society has digitized over a million newspaper pages from over 230 newspapers. These papers are on two different sites: Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America. (There is no overlap between sites so you have so search both.) 

Using Primary Sources

How do you use these sources? An old article published by the Library of Congress (no longer online) suggested four types of activities: Focus, Inquiry, Application, and Assessment.  

Here are a few ideas that could fall into these broader categories:

• Build PowerPoints
• Create DBQs 
• Analyze them using a primary source analysis tool from the National Archives or Library of Congress
• Create Historical Assessments of Thinking
• Create a Question Focus
• Get a feel for what it was like back then (one of my favorite exercises is to have students shop the ads in historic newspapers during a specific time period).

But I'd love to hear more from you! What are YOUR favorite ways to use primary sources? 

P.S. No one has time to build every lesson from scratch. Check out some of our plug-and-play primary-source based lesson plans.

Resources to Help You Use Chronicling America

Last week I raved about Chronicling America. This week, I'm turning Teaching Montana History over to Natasha Hollenbach, the Montana Digital Newspaper Project Assistant at the Montana Historical Society, for more on Chronicling America (or ChronAm, as she calls it). Here's Natasha:

Last month I attended the annual National Digital Newspaper Program conference in Washington DC, hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.  On the second day, we three presenters talked about how Chronicling America is used for education.  The first showed off the EDSITEment website which is a product of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is a vast site. There are lesson plans focusing specifically on Chronicling America resources, as well as many other online humanities resources (Picturing America, for example). I strongly encourage you to check it out. 

Both EdSITEMENT and the Vermont Digital Newspaper Project have video tutorials about using, searching and saving/printing on ChronAm. The Vermont site also has a For Educators section under Resources, Much of their information is going to be useful to you, even though they highlight Vermont content. For example, among their lesson plans and activities are:

• Lesson: Expand History Content-specific Vocabulary through Historic Newspapers [Grades: 9-10 (Adaptable for grades 4-16)] and
• Have students find an interesting advertisement and research what it’s advertising. 

One presenter, who works at a community college in Arkansas, completely changed my approach to ChronAm. If you’ve seen the map below of states participating in ChronAm, you’ll know that there are no Arkansas newspapers. However, she still uses ChronAm in her course on Arkansas history because major state events make national news. Such a simple concept, but I was always so focused on the Montana newspapers, that it really never occurred to me that I should be encouraging people to search other states’ content.



States in green have content in Chronicling America

Afterwards, I realized that I had just encountered a student doing this over the summer.  She came into the Research Center library and told us that she was researching the national coverage of the Marias Massacre. She had already been on ChronAm and had found lots of articles, but none from Montana. Obviously something was wrong with that, so first I checked to make sure we had digitized newspapers from that year.  (Montana newspapers cover 1864-1922 in just over 250,000 pages from 79 titles, so there are gaps depending on where and when your event happened.  Click here for a map showing Montana digitized newspapers available through ChronAm and other sites.)  

I did find relevant papers available so I did some investigation and realized that the reason she wasn’t finding anything was that the Montana papers don’t call it a massacre.  I found alternate search terms for her and left her to continue her research.  

Sometimes doing history research requires adjusting your conception of the event and sometimes it helps to think in broader terms about your sources. I'll leave you with that idea. If you do have your students research in ChronAm, and they can't find anything on their topic, make sure you talk with them about search terms. How has our vocabulary and what we call events changed over time? (Hint: World War I wasn't called World War I until long after it was over.) Ohio History Connection also has a video on this very topic that might also be worth sharing with your students!

Happy searching!

Announcing the Martha Plassman Prize and Generally Celebrating Chronicling America

As one of my colleagues is fond of saying, old newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. That’s why Chronicling America—a national, ever-expanding newspaper digitization project—is one of my favorite resources.

Thus far, as part of this project, Montana has digitized selected ranges of nine different newspapers, with twenty-four more titles to come in over the course of the next year. See the list of titles here.

To encourage folks to discover this treasure trove, we created the Thinking like a Historian lesson plan, which outlines a way to engage students in in-depth research, but also offers options for shorter forays into the historic newspapers.


We’ve also included lessons using Chronicling America in the Girl from the Gulches Study Guide (see, particularly Lessons 5 and 7) that can be used as part of a unit on Mary Ronan or as stand-alone lessons.

That’s the old news. The NEW news is that we’ve just created the Martha Plassman Prize. This prize will award $500 and a certificate from the Montana Historical Society at the State National History Day competition to the student project that best uses Montana’s newspapers digitized on Chronicling America.

If you are participating in National History Day, please let your students know about this opportunity and encourage them to take advantage of it. Of course, we hope that students research a Montana history topic (see here for topic ideas), but that is NOT part of the prize consideration. To be eligible to win the Martha Plassman Prize, students researching a national topic can look in Montana newspapers to see how their topic was covered here at home.


if you aren’t participating in National History Day yet, there is still time. (Contact Tom Rust at trust@msubillings.edu for more information.) We’ll even be giving a training to help new teachers get started in Billings, February 6 and 7 as part of the Montana University Systems Professional Development Offering: Literacy for the Common Core.


P.S. You can find out more about Chronicling America and access additional links to Chronicling America teaching resources here and here.

Teaching with Primary Sources

 Donna McCrae, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Montana Mansfield Library, pulled together this very handy list of websites that support Teaching with Primary Sources for a presentation she gave at the MFPE Educator Conference. She gave me permission to share it with you all.

SELECT WEBSITES WITH TEACHING GUIDES / LESSON PLANS

• Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets – Primary source collections exploring topics in history, literature and culture developed by educators, complete with teaching guides for classroom use.

 

• Library of Congress Classroom Materials – Curated thematic primary source sets, lesson plans and example presentations.

 

• DocsTeach - Features activities from educators from around the country based on documents found in the National Archives holdings. Filter by historical era, thinking skill, activity type and grade level.

 

• Smithsonian for Educators - Online lesson plans, interactive activities, and multimedia materials, tailored to various grade levels and subjects.

 

• EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web - National Endowment for the Humanities site with lesson plans, teacher’s guides and media resources. Includes ideas and activities focused on local history.

 

• Digital Inquiry Group – Curriculum designed to engage students in historical inquiry. Each Reading Like a Historian lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills. This site requires a log-in.

 

• Montana Historical Society Resources for Educators – Resources organized by skill level and by subject. Lesson plans are available for several subjects including civics, geography, art, mining history, and Indian Education for All.

 

• Newberry Library Classroom Resources - Digital Collections for the Classroom support key history and literature learning goals in critical thinking, analysis, close reading, and visual literacy. Includes lesson plans, skills lessons and contextual essays.

 

• National Park Service Teaching with Museum Collections – Includes lesson plans for teaching with objects. Regional lesson plans include Grant Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Nez Perce National Historic Park and Yellowstone National Park.

 

• National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places – Location, theme and state-based lesson plans. Includes guides for using and writing place-based ‘classic’ and ‘lightening’ plans.

SELECT WEBSITES WITH PRIMARY SOURCE CONTENT

• Library of Congress Digital Collections – curated sets of digitized content from the Library of Congress collections. Formats include (but are not limited to) photos, maps, pamphlets, audio, and moving images.

 

• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) - Over 52 million keyword-searchable images, texts, video and sound files. Curated exhibitions with primary source content accompanied by contextual essays.

 

• Digitized Montana Newspapers – Landing page, hosted by the Montana Historical Society, for linking to digitized newspapers available via the public access portal for Newspapers.com, Chronicling America, and several other Montana newspapers.

 

• Chronicling America - A searchable digital collection of historic newspapers from across the United States dating from 1736 to 1963. Browse and keyword search options. Full image.

 

• Montana History Portal – Digitized content contributed by Montana libraries, museums, archives, and cultural institutions. Contents include maps, photographs, rare books, historic documents, school yearbooks, diaries and letters, oral histories, audio and video clips, paintings, illustrations and art. Curated Digital Exhibits pair primary sources around a theme or topic with narrative text.

 

• David Rumsey Map Collection – Over 142,000 digitized maps from around the world from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.  

A Little of This and A Little of That

 No theme this time--just cool stuff, ideas, and opportunities.

Present at MFPE

Do you have a strategy, lesson, or resource that you think is worth sharing with other teachers? I bet you do! MFPE is accepting applications to present at the 2023 MFPE Educator Conference in Billings, October 19-20. The Social Studies strand of this conference is only as strong as we make it--and I'd like your help making it spectacular. Apply to present! 

Read All About It!

The first batch of newspapers from MTHS's latest cycle of the National Digital Newspaper Program are now online on the Chronicling America site! This batch includes three papers out of Browning, with issues from 1939 to 1963: 

• Glacier County Chief, 1939-1940 
• Browning Chief, 1941-1953 
• The Glacier Reporter, 1953-1963.

Need a reminder of how cool and pedagogically useful digitized newspapers are? Check out these past posts. 

Billings Public Library Community Archive Project

This spring, Billings Public Library is launching a program to collect photos of Billings from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Library has already partnered with the Montana History Portal (formerly known as Montana Memory Project) to digitize hundreds of historic photos and documents; this new program will look to fill in the gap of the later 20th century. Images will be displayed at the Library, with selected images uploaded to the Portal. Check out the details of this exciting new program, then think--could you and your students cooperate with a public library in your own community to do something similar? 

Apply to Become a Teacher Leader

Middle school teachers! If you love Montana history and want to share your passion with colleagues, consider applying to become a Teacher Leader in Montana History. Find out more here. Applications are due April 23.   

Last Chance to Participate in History Unfolded

History Unfolded is a project organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It recruits citizen historians (including students!) to search digitized newspapers to uncover what ordinary people around the country could have known about the Holocaust from reading their local newspapers in the years 1933–1945. The project has been going on for several years, and will end this spring. Participants can gain free access to newspapers.com on March 27-April 2, April 17-23, and May 15-21. (This makes the task much easier!) There are classroom resources for teachers if you want to register your class. Learn more.   

Chronicling America, Read All About It

It’s been a while since I’ve talked up one of my all-time favorite sites: Chronicling America.  Chronicling America is a national, ever-expanding newspaper digitization project spearheaded by the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities.  According to “Edsitement,” the NEH’s teaching portal:

Chronicling America is a boon for teaching primary source research skills such as gathering and evaluating information, analysis, comparison and contrast, critical thinking, and the use of technology.

Through Chronicling America you can view newspaper pages from 1836 to 1922 from Arizona, the District of Columbia, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. As the project is ongoing, the greatest concentration of material that is currently available online is from 1900-1922, but Chronicling America is continuously expanding the date range and states of the newspapers in its collection.

As one of the participating states, Montana had a committee of historians help prioritize which papers and date ranges to digitize. You can find the list here.

 

The digitization project is great in itself. Even better is the outpouring of lesson plans for using the resource. Edsitement has descriptions and links to featured lesson plans, which include looks at women’s suffrage, immigration, the 1918 flu epidemic, famous authors like Walt Whitman and Jack London, and much more.

 

Montana’s contribution to Chronicling America lesson plans includes “Thinking  like a Historian: Using Digital Newspapers in the Classroom,” which asks students to explore daily life in Virginia City during the gold rush before the coming of the railroad, using the following essential questions: “How has life changed and how has it remained the same? How does transportation affect daily life? What would it have been like to live in Vir¬ginia City during the gold rush?”

If you don’t have time for a big project, consider printing out a few pages from one of the digitized newspapers that matches your larger unit (make sure to include pages with advertisements). Then have students explore the paper by playing a game of “Newspaper Bingo,” or going on a newspaper scavenger hunt. Follow the game with a discussion about what surprised, intrigued, or confused students about the newspapers themselves—and what questions they raised about life in the past. (Sample bingo cards and instructions are available through the “Thinking Like a Historian” lesson plan.

Three additional Chronicling America lesson plans are included in the new study guide for Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan. Two of them can be adapted to use without reading the anchor text and can easily be adapted to other time periods. “What Can You Buy? What Could Mary Buy?” has students looking at advertisements today and in the 1860s, and choosing presents for themselves and their family. The second, “Found Poetry,” asks students to create a found poem, based on an article from the Montana Post.

p.s. For those of you who have students participating in National History Day, NEH is offering a prize this year “for students who incorporate research using Chronicling America.”  (More on NHD here.) Chronicling America’s list of recommended topics (fascinating reading in itself) would be a great place to browse for National History Day topics, or research projects more generally.

Searching Chronicling America

Huntley librarian Pam Roberts made my day recently with an email talking about her work with a Child Growth and Development class. She said the students had a marvelous time researching child care and baby equipment in the advertisements of the historic newspapers on Chronicling America. (The differences between accepted practice then and now was "eye opening," she said.)

As many of you know, Chronicling America is one of my favorite sites. The Montana Historical Society is actively digitizing Montana newspapers. I just talked to the project coordinator and she expects many more Montana titles will be available soon.

Of course, new technology is always a little daunting, and in Chronicling America, as with all large digital collections, it can be difficult to find what you are looking for—especially at first. TPS Barat’s blog, which focuses on primary sources from the Library of Congress, has put together a very useful post “Advanced Search Tips: Chronicling America Historic Newspapers” that can make your (and your students’) research more fruitful.

If you are looking for even more guidance, consider using one of the lesson plans we’ve created with Billings school librarian Ruth Ferris.

“Thinking like a Historian: Using Digital Newspapers in the Classroom” asks students to explore daily life in Virginia City during the gold rush before the coming of the railroad, using the following essential questions: “How has life changed and how has it remained the same? How does transportation affect daily life? What would it have been like to live in Virginia City during the gold rush?”


Three additional Chronicling America lesson plans were included in the new study guide for Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan. Two of them can be adapted to use without reading the anchor text and can easily be adapted to other time periods. “What Can You Buy? What Could Mary Buy?” has students looking at advertisements today and in the 1860s, and choosing presents for themselves and their family. The second, “Found Poetry,” asks students to create a found poem, based on an article from the Montana Post.

Many other folks are also creating Chronicling America lesson plans. See here for more details. 

Chronicling America: One of the Coolest, Most Underused Resources Out There

I had a great time visiting with the teachers who stopped by our booth at the MEA-MFT conference. Many were absolutely amazed by the digitized newspapers available through Chronicling America, a searchable newspaper database produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although I've been singing Chronicling America's praises since 2012, enough teachers hadn't heard of it (and enough new material is available through it) that I've decided CA will be the focus of the next few posts. 

Chronicling America now has over 10,000,000 digitized newspaper pages from 40 states, including pages from 79 different titles in Montana:

Glasgow Courier (1915-22) * Neihart Herald (1891-1900) * Anaconda Standard (1889-99) * Great Falls Leader (1888-89) * New Age (1902-03) * Benton Record (1875-84) * Great Falls Tribune (1885-96, 1919-22) * New North-West (1869-97) * Billings Gazette (1899-1909) * Harlowton News (1909-14) * Philipsburg Mail (1887-1901) * Billings Herald (1882-85) * Havre Herald (1904-08) * Producers News (1918-22) * Bozeman Avant Courier (1871-79) * Helena Herald (1872-83) * Ravalli Republican (1894-98) * Bozeman Chronicle (1883-88) * Helena Independent (1889-94) * Red Lodge Picket (1889-1902) *  Judith Gap Journal (1909-13) * River Press (1880-88, 1902-14) * The Powder River County Examiner & the Broadus Independent (1919-22) * Kalispell Bee (1900-03) * Rocky Mountain Husbandman (1875-84) * Butte Daily Bulletin (1919-20) * Libby Herald (1911-13) * Ronan Pioneer (1911-17) * Butte Inter Mountain (1899-1903) * Livingston Enterprise (1884-92) * Rosebud County News (1901-06) * Butte Miner (1879-89) * Madisonian (1895-96) * Roundup Record (1908-13) * Colored Citizen (1894) * Malta Enterprise (1908-16) * Suffrage Daily News (1914) * Cut Bank Pioneer Press (1911-17) * Mineral Argus (1883-86) * Sun River Sun (1884-85) * Dillon Tribune (1881-87) * Missoulian (1909-14, 1917-18) * Whitefish Pilot (1908-12) * Dupuyer Acantha (1894-1901) * Montana News (1904-12) * Wibaux Pioneer (1907-14) * Ekalaka Eagle (1909-16) * Montana Nonpartisan (1918-19) * Yellowstone Journal (1882-94) * Fergus County Argus (1886-1906) * Montana Plaindealer (1906-11) * Yellowstone Monitor (1908-15) * Fergus County Democrat (1904-16) * Montana Post (1864-69) * Western News (1900-10) ... with Helena Herald (1884-1889) and Butte Daily Post (1917) coming soon!

Of special note are the more than a dozen marvelous pictorial editions that the newspaper staffs typically spent a year preparing, for example, the Livingston Enterprise's Souvenir edition, published January 1, 1900.

People of all ages LOVE exploring historic newspapers, which are the closest thing to a time machine we have. Here are a few simple ideas to get your students started:

• Do you do Newspapers in Education? How about comparing today's paper with a historic newspaper from the same date--and maybe even from your town?  
• Go shopping. "What can I buy now/What could I buy then" is a great quick starting point for exploring a different period of history.
• Play "newspaper bingo." This is another way to explore the social world of the era you are studying (Sample bingo cards and instructions are available here.) 
• Research specific, high-interest events referenced in your textbook or literature study (e.g., the sinking of the Titanic.)
• Investigate holidays. Can you find stories about Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, or Valentine's Day?

How are YOU using Chronicling America in your classroom? Let me know and I'll include it in a future post.

p.s. For those looking for more guidance, the Library of Congress is hosting a free online conference, "Unlocking the Power of Primary Sources," October 27-28, 2:00 p.m.- 6:00 p.m. MST. You can register for individual sessions, including "Teaching with Historical Newspapers," 4-4:50 MST, on October 28. Honestly, the entire schedule looks great, so check it out!