This week we have almost 30 newspaper titles added to DigitalNC. These titles include a Raleigh paper about agriculture and it’s “kindred arts,” an employee paper for North Carolina shipbuilders during World War II, and plenty of others from Wilmington, Raleigh, and New Bern!

Over the next year, we’ll be adding millions of newspaper images to DigitalNC. 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’s additions are the following:

• The North-Carolina Gazette (New Bern, N.C.) – 1751-1774
• Wilmington Gazette (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1816
• The Newbernian (New Bern, N.C.) – 1849-1853
• The Daily Carolinian (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871-1872
• The Daily Era (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1872-1873
• The Carolina Era (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871
• The Farmer and Mechanic (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1899
• New Berne Times (New Bern, N.C.) – 1873
• The People’s Press and Wilmington Advertiser (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1835-1841
• The Daily Herald (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1856-1857
• The Sun (New Bern, N.C.) – 1908-1914
• Eastern Carolina Republican (New Bern, N.C.) – 1850-1851
• Republican and Patriot (New Bern, N.C.) – 1851-1852
• Daily Progress (New Bern, N.C.) – 1862-1863
• The Democratic Signal (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1843-1844
• North Carolina Christian Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1856-1858
• New Berne Weekly Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1882-1883
• New Bern Semi-Weekly Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1914
• The Daily Wilmington Herald (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1865-1866
• The Daily Dispatch (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1867
• The Evening Dispatch (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1895-1916
• New Berne Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1882
• The Arator (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1855-1857
• The North Carolina Shipbuilder (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1942-1946
• The Star (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1808-1815
• The Star and North Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1816-1834
• Daily Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) – 1875-1884
• Daily State Journal (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1862-1865
• The Raleigh Sentinel (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876

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.