Thanks to our partners at Madison County Public Library, as well as generous funding from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), we are excited to announce that nearly 600 new issues of The News-Record (Marshall, N.C.) are now available on DigitalNC. These newest additions help fill in 11 years of DigitalNC’s collection of The News-Record (Marshall, N.C.), which includes over 3,500 issues spanning from 1902 to 1988.

DigitalNC visitors can now browse issues from the following years:

• 1917
• 1918
• 1919
• 1920
• 1930
• 1931
• 1932
• 1933
• 1934
• 1935
• 1936

More information about our partner, Madison County Public Library, can be found here. 

More collections, including scrapbooks and over 50 yearbooks, can be found on the Madison County Public Library’s contributor page linked here. 

Thanks to our amazing partners at the New Hanover County Public Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce that new issues of the Wilmington Morning Star are now available online! These new issues cover daily life in Wilmington from over a century ago — in the far-flung year of 1924. They will join over twenty thousand issues currently available online, ranging from as far back as 1867 and as recently as 1947!

The 1924 issues of The Wilmington Morning Star cover a revolutionary and exciting period of American life — Wilmington residents wrote fervently on international politics, women gained increased autonomy in social and professional spheres, and advancements in technology increased both quality of life and access to information. For the first time ever, mankind could fly, speak through airwaves, and even file for divorce. In a time when societal and technological advancements revolutionized America’s understanding of possibility, the unbelievable became believable. All of these factors lead to some interesting articles in The Wilmington Morning Star — such as Laddie the hero dog answering phone calls, or psychic visions reuniting lost sons with their mothers.

Closer to home, The Wilmington Morning Star paid special mind to the nuptials of the Biltmore Vanderbilts. In 1924, Miss Cornelia Vanderbilt announced her nuptials only two years after her societal debut. In an announcement to the Times, Miss Cornelia Vanderbilt announced her engagement to the Honorable John F. A. Cecil, the then secretary of the British embassy in Washington. The paper breathlessly followed the engagement, wedding, and reception over the span of 1924, and updates were frequently posted on the front page of its society section. Common topics include Miss Vanderbilt’s wintering at the Biltmore, her rumored meeting of Cecil, and their many appearances in polite society. These articles were often sandwiched between updates on the proliferation of divorce across the country, which struck many with apprehension on marriage. Reading through these stories evokes an atmosphere similar to a Regency romance: is John Cecil marrying into the Vanderbilt family for the right reasons? How do Miss Vanderbilt’s parents feel about her engagement? Will the marriage take place at the Biltmore in Asheville, or even Raleigh? Who will cater? It’s reassuring to see the cult of celebrity through the retrospective lens of a century, and one is struck by the similarities between the idle rich of yesteryear and today.

You can read all about psychic dogs and Vanderbilt family right now at DigitalNC here. Interested in reading more issues of The Wilmington Star? You can find our collection of over twenty thousand issues online now at DigitalNC here. Thanks again to our amazing partners at the New Hanover County Public Library for making this collection available. If you’re interested in learning more about our partners, you can find their page on DigitalNC here, or visit their website online here.

Thanks to our partners at the Appalachian Regional Library and Ashe County Public Library, as well as funding from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), new issues of The Skyland Post (West Jefferson, N.C.) newspaper are now available on our website DigitalNC.

These editions from July 1952 to November 1956 reflect the nation’s anxiety over the polio epidemic. People of all ages and genders faced illness and even death from the disease. Parents sequestered their children indoors, away from playdates and large gatherings, for fear of them catching the illness. Those who became afflicted by polio risked a life confined to the iron lung, a machine designed to help those with paralyzed lung muscles breathe. Although Dr. Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine by the mid-1950s, the disease was not eliminated in North and South America until the mid-1990s.

The Skyland Post uses its platform to advocate for those who fell victim to the disease, especially children. Advertisements for donations for March of Dimes, an organization created to improve the health of mothers and babies, run throughout these new editions. Local organizations in Ashe County also pledged their monetary support to eradicate the disease. Entire communities came together to raise funds for March of Dimes through activities like benefit games.

News of the polio vaccine also bled into The Skyland Post. The October 20, 1955 edition of the paper declared hopeful news – limited vaccines would be available for children five to nine years old. Hopeful pieces declared that the vaccine may grant “life-time immunity,” and parents were encouraged to have their children vaccinated as soon as possible. After years of living in fear of polio, hope was finally on the horizon.

Information about the polio disease is from the Mayo Clinic website seen here.

To browse all of our newspapers by location, date, and type, take a look at our North Carolina Newspapers collection. 

To see what other materials they have contributed, visit the partner page of Appalachian Regional Library here. and Ashe County Public Library here.

To learn more about what the library has been up to, check out the Appalachian Regional Library website here and the Ashe County Public Library website here.

Thanks to our partners at the Harnett County Public Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce over a hundred new issues of the Harnett County News are now available online! Over one thousand pages across 116 issues cover nearly a decade of developments across Harnett County, chronicling the years from 1953 to 1958.

The Harnett County News has been published in Lillington, North Carolina weekly for over a hundred years. Its initial issues were published by Henderson Steele, and the paper gradually evolved to cover not only Harnett County, but Sampson, Johnson, and other surrounding counties as well. The new issues of the title will cover a critical gap in DigitalNC’s coverage of the paper, which stretches from its inception in 1919 to as recently as 1979. They will provide a critical community perspective on the economic prosperity witnessed by Harnett County residents during the period. Hot topics found in these papers include the end of the Korean War, the arrest of Rosa Parks, and Dwight D. Eisenhower visiting Salisbury.

You can find every issue of the Harnett County News online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about the history of Harnett? Our partners at the Harnett County Public Library have an abundance of records available for your perusal online now at DigitalNC. You can find their partner page here, or visit the library’s website online here.