History in News : Project Begins to Make State Newspapers a Resource

“I know of no better way to feel the texture of life in a locality in a time gone by, than by roaming the pages of its old newspapers . . .” --Historian Murray Morgan

As Henry Snyder turned the fragile pages of the May 25, 1894, Der Sud-California, a long-forgotten, German-language newspaper published in Los Angeles, he mused:

“Newspapers are man’s single-most important source of written information. Yet, they are one of our most neglected historical resources.”

Snyder, 61, a history professor and director of the UC Riverside Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, has begun an extraordinary undertaking--to find, catalogue and microfilm every existing issue of every newspaper published in California.

The massive effort is part of the United States Newspaper Project-- a national, state-by-state effort to identify, preserve and make available to researchers in a national data bank newspapers published throughout the country.

With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and technical advice from the Library of Congress, the project is described by the Organization of American Historians as “the single-most important effort to complete the history of this nation.”

The historians group came up with the idea for the project.

Starting with Iowa in 1977, 36 states have joined the effort. California is the last of the large states to get on board.

UC Riverside’s bibliographical studies center recently received a $1.4-million grant from NEH to begin cataloguing and microfilming California newspapers.

Snyder expects it will take nine to 15 years and cost more than $15 million to do the job.

“We estimate there have been about 15,000 newspapers with different names published in this state since Aug. 15, 1846, when Robert Semple started his weekly, the Californian, in Monterey,” Snyder said.

He hopes to uncover newspapers that lasted only a few weeks or a few months, even though copies of them are not known to survive.

“We will send staff members to every library, museum, courthouse, historical society, existing newspaper and to private collectors in our search,” said Snyder, who will oversee a full-time staff of seven, in addition to part-time workers. “We know newspapers are stored in barns, basements, attics, in old chests and hope people will let us know about them.”

The search begins in October in the state’s two largest libraries, Bancroft at UC Berkeley, and the California State Library in Sacramento. The two libraries boast the biggest California newspaper collections. Each has more than 2,000 different newspapers published in California but many have only one or a few issues, nowhere near full runs, Snyder said.

California has a rich and colorful newspaper history. By 1858, there were 56 newspapers in the state with 37 published in San Francisco, more than London had at the time. By 1894, there were 500 newspapers in the state.

Today, there are about 850 daily and weekly newspapers published in 415 cities and towns in California. The 110-year-old Los Angeles Times is the largest in the state. In many smaller cities and towns, newspapers provide the only existing records of those communities.

Although many of the newspapers have been around for a century or more, researchers feel a certain sense of urgency.

“It is absolutely essential to do this now as we are in a race to save many of the newspapers from self-destructing,” Snyder said. He explained that, since 1875, sulfuric acid has been used in paper making as a bleach to produce white paper. The acid eats the wood pulp, causing newspapers ultimately to crumble and turn to dust.

“I am tremendously excited about tackling the newspaper project, because it is something that must be done and as a native Californian I am pleased to be working on a major project focused on my home state,” Snyder said.

Snyder also is North American director of the world’s largest bibliographical project--to catalogue everything published in England and the British Empire between 1701 and 1800.