16 Wilmington newspapers from the 19th century now on DigitalNC
Last summer we hosted students from a middle school in Wilmington who did extensive research on the 1898 riots in Wilmington. They came along with staff from the Cape Fear Museum, who brought the issues of the Wilmington Daily Record the museum held. We scanned those newspapers on site, along with clippings from papers around the state and country with articles about the riots. To learn more about their visit, read the post we did about it during the summer during the summer here.
This fall, as a continuing part of our work with this group, we were pleased to make available 16 newspapers published in Wilmington during the 19th century, ranging in dates from 1803 to 1901. Some of the papers have several years of content available and several have just an issue or two. But together, they paint a rich picture of what life in Wilmington looked like during the 1800s and the wide variety of political viewpoints that were held in the city, and North Carolina as a whole. The papers shed light on a port town that was instrumental in the Civil War and in the politics of Reconstruction afterwards, which culminated in the infamous riots of 1898.
The sixteen papers now available are:
The Cape Fear Herald
The True Republican or American Whig
The Liberalist and Wilmington Reporter
Wilmington Advertiser and
Merchants’ and Farmers’ Gazette
Our Rights
Sunday Morning Mail
The New Era
The Wilmington Gazette
The Wilmington Post
The Evening Post
The Daily Review
The Weekly Star
The Wilmington Democrat
The New South
The Wilmington Dispatch
View other newspapers on DigitalNC here.