In following with our collaboration with newspapers.com, we have another large batch of newspapers this week! These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use.

This week we have over 5,000 issues of The Wilmington Morning Star. The paper was founded in 1867 by former Confederate Major William H. Bernard and played a role in stoking the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. In November of 1898 a biracial government was legitimately elected in Wilmington, which the paper claimed to be fraudulent. Earlier that year, Daily Record editor, Alexander Manly, published an article proposing that it was possible for white women to be attracted to black men. The Morning Star found this to be “vile and slanderous” and riled a mob of angry white supremacists to burn down the paper’s office then claim that they had not started the violence. The following clippings are from November 9, 10, and 11. The day before the massacre, the day of, and the day after.

Here are the rest of this week’s additions:

• Weekly Progress (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1864-1867
• The Raleigh Minerva (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1810-1821
• Daily Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) – 1873-1886
• The Raleigh Register (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1830-1861
• The Raleigh Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876-1880
• The Raleigh Times (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1911-1912
• The North Carolinian (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1892-1908
• The Morning Post (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1899-1905
• The Raleigh Post (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1900
• The Times-Visitor (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1895-1900
• The Progressive Farmer (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1919
• The Raleigh Enterprise (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1904-1907
• Raleigh Christian Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871-1915
• The Daily Progress (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1865-1867
• Asheville Gazette-News (Asheville, N.C.) – 1898-1915
• Asheville Daily Citizen (Asheville, N.C.) – 1891
• The Press-Visitor (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1891-1898
• The Raleigh Evening Times (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1906
• The Progressive Farmer and Southern Farm Gazette (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1913-1916
• The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1898-1922
• The Daily Conservative (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1864-1865
• The Newbern Gazette (New Bern, N.C.) – 1764-1801
• The Wilmington Herald (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1865
• Newbern Weekly Progress (New Bern, N.C.) – 1862-1863
• The State Gazette of North-Carolina (New Bern, N.C.) – 1797-1799

If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.

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 news in Wilmington, as told in the Cape Fear Herald, published on Nov. 4, 1803

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.