Maryland Suffrage News Now Available in Chronicling America

Don’t let the end of Women’s History Month be the end of reading and research about women’s history! The Maryland Suffrage News is now available online at Chronicling America, and it is full of information about how women built up the suffrage movement in Maryland from 1912 to 1920. A weekly newspaper that was published out of Baltimore, the Maryland Suffrage News was edited by its founder, Edith Houghton Hooker, and managed by Dora G. Ogle. 

Maryland suffrage news. (Baltimore, Md.), 15 Jan. 1916. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89060379/1916-01-15/ed-1/seq-1/>

As an activist newspaper, the Maryland Suffrage News focused on grassroots organizing, announcing and reporting on such actions as meetings, petitions, and parades. One distinctive strategy was suffrage pilgrimages across the state. The newspaper informed readers of upcoming events and related what had happened at previous events. You can search the name of your county to see what activities were taking place there: where the meetings were held, who were the speakers, how many attended. Activists would have been able to read remarks made in meetings on the other side of the state, or even in other states, as they strategized to win Maryland over to their cause county by county.

Brood X Cicadas are on their Way: Find them in the Newspapers

Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.), 21 June 1915. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88065726/1915-06-21/ed-1/seq-3/>

It’s that time of year! After spending 17 years underground, the Brood X cicadas will emerge around the third week of May. “For about four to six weeks after the cicadas emerge, woods and neighborhoods will ring with their buzzing mating calls” (Kelly Kizer Whitt, EARTH, April 1, 2021). Have no fear, though! The cicadas are harmless. They won’t eat crops, and they won’t bite you. They just come to do their business and leave. Once the eggs are laid, the adult cicadas will die; the baby cicadas will hatch and burrow back into the ground for 17 years; and the cycle will repeat.

Cicadas are already trending in the news in the Mid-Atlantic region. Perhaps you’re wondering what the community thought of Brood X’s arrival in the past. Chronicling America is a great resource to compare current news articles about the 17 year cicadas with historic news articles about the brood. 

Catoctin clarion. [volume] (Mechanicstown, Md.), 12 June 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026688/1919-06-12/ed-1/seq-4/>

In a 1919 article of the Catoctin Clarion, published in Thurmont, Maryland, there is a quote from a 1669 book that details a cicada visit from years earlier: ““It is to be observed,” he says, “that the spring before there was a numerous company of flies, which were like for bigness unto wasps or bumble-bees, they came out of little holes in the ground, and did eat up the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made all the woods ring of them and ready to deaf the hearers” (Catoctin clarion. [volume] (Mechanicstown, Md.), 12 June 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026688/1919-06-12/ed-1/seq-4/>). Of course, they weren’t flies, and they didn’t “eat up the green things.” However, their mating rituals were the same. Hundreds of years later, the Brood X cicadas are likely to do so every 17 years for hundreds of years to come, despite what some 1919 headlines might have led people (who didn’t read the article) to believe.

Catoctin clarion. [volume] (Mechanicstown, Md.), 12 June 1919. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026688/1919-06-12/ed-1/seq-4/>

Women’s History Month: Suffrage Pilgrimages in Historic Maryland Newspapers

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’re going to take a look at suffrage pilgrimages that took place in Maryland in the summers of 1914 and 1915.

Back in August 2020, the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project and the Maryland State Archives co-hosted a social media campaign in honor of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. Many of the posts created for the campaign came from a newspaper digitized by HMNP in Chronicling America titled the Maryland Suffrage News.

_{One of HMNP’s Instagram posts for the #MDSuffrage and #MarylandWomenVote social media campaign}

Searching Digitized Newspapers in Chronicling America

Welcome to Chronicling America! 

A collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) awards organizations grants to create state partnerships for newspaper digitization. As a result, state partners contribute digitized newspapers to Chronicling America. As of January 2021, Chronicling America contains over 17 million pages of digitized newspapers that are freely accessible to the public. Newspapers from 48 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico are included in this remarkable collection (check out this map for a visual!). Newspapers in Chronicling America go as far back as 1777, but as seen in this data visualization, most of the digitized newspaper titles were published between 1850 and 1922. For the state of Maryland, the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project at the University of Maryland Libraries partners with other archives, libraries, and historical societies throughout the state to digitize newspapers published in Maryland for Chronicling America.

_{The citizen. (Frederick City, Md.), 01 March 1895. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89060092/1895-03-01/ed-1/seq-1/>}

For the Maryland collection, Chronicling America contains issues from 50 newspaper titles from across the state published between 1840 and 1951. Some highlights from the collection include:

Holiday Festivities in the Newspapers

It’s the holiday season! Let’s take a look at all the ways people in Maryland have celebrated Chanukah and Christmas over the years found in historic Maryland newspapers from Chronicling America.

Frostburg mining journal. [volume] (Frostburg, Md.), 16 Dec. 1893. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025350/1893-12-16/ed-1/seq-5/>

It’s the Holiday Season: Shopping and Advertisements in Historic Maryland Newspapers

Holiday shopping has always been popular. But thanks to the ample opportunities for online shopping, free shipping, early Black Friday deals, and stores opening on Thanksgiving, it’s fairly easy to spot the ways shopping has changed throughout the twenty-first century.

With the COVID-19 pandemic enacting many changes, it’s fair to assume that holiday shopping is going to be a little different this year: Amazon shifted their annual Prime Days from the summer to the fall, Target and Walmart announced store closings on Thanksgiving Day, and many small businesses will continue to rely on curb-side pick-up and online ordering this holiday season. 

Spooky Celebrations

_{Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.), 31 Oct. 1921. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88065726/1921-10-31/ed-1/seq-1/>}

All Hallow’s Eve, All Hallow Eve, Hallow Eve, Hallow Even, Hallow E’en, Hallowe’en, Halloween, Eve of All Saints’ Day–whatever you want to call it or however you’d like to spell it–is a day with origins dating all the way back to the Celts, and it came to the American East Coast in the 1600s (“Halloween 2020”). More common in Maryland and southern states, Halloween wasn’t celebrated nationally until the Third Wave of Immigration (“Halloween 2020”). Today, many people in the US have come to observe Halloween as a commercial and secular holiday, but the way that people celebrate it may differ by individual or family. We can recognize these differences throughout the years, across the state of Maryland.

17 million pages in Chronicling America!

This month, Chronicling America reached 17 million newspaper pages! Historic newspaper pages are contributed to the Chronicling America newspaper database by National Digital Newspaper Program partner organizations from all across the country. The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project at University of Maryland Libraries is the Maryland state awardee of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between National Endowment for the Humanities and Library of Congress.

^{Image courtesy of National Endowment for the Humanities.}

#MarylandWomenVote: Celebrating the Centennial of the 19th Amendment

The Historic Maryland Newspapers Project (HMNP) here at UMD Libraries teamed up with the Maryland State Archives (MSA) and other cultural heritage institutions across the state to carry out a social media campaign on the Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook platforms to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. We at HMNP wanted our posts to showcase elements of women’s suffrage in Maryland and/or aspects from the broader suffrage movement that were featured in the Chronicling America Maryland newspaper titles. MSA wanted their posts to examine specific stories from the movement in Maryland. By utilizing the same hashtags, our content would trend together on each platform, and we invited others to use the same hashtags during a week long campaign to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment in Maryland earlier this month.

First HMNP tweet to kick off the #MarylandWomenVote and #MDSuffrage campaign on Twitter. Image utilized in post from: Maryland suffrage news. (Baltimore, Md.), 13 June 1914. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89060379/1914-06-13/ed-1/seq-1/>.

Story on 1912 typhoon goes viral

In the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda’s destruction in the Philippines earlier this month, a 1912 newspaper hosted by Chronicling America has gone viral.

The November 30, 1912, issue of the Washington Herald contains a front page story about a typhoon estimated to have killed 15,000 people and “practically destroyed” Tacloban, the same city hardest hit by Yolanda. Additional details were sparse because the storm had destroyed all telegraphic communications infrastructure.

Although I usually don’t buy into the pessimistic idiom that “history repeats itself,” that’s exactly what seems to have happened with the devastating typhoons of 1912 and 2013.

See the entire issue of the Washington Herald here.