The Claude News: Our Newest Historic Newspaper Collection!

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“The Oldest and Best Read County Seat Weekly in the Panhandle,” the Claude News, is now accessible on The Portal to Texas History.  Through the hard work of the Richard S. and Leah Morris Memorial Library, and through the generous support of the Tocker Foundation, newspapers from Armstrong County’s seat, Claude, are available from across six decades.  Originally named Armstrong City, Claude was founded in 1887 by the Ft. Worth and Denver City Railway, and it was very shortly thereafter renamed for Claude Ayers, the engineer who brought the first train through the town.  With ties to Charles Goodnight and to Hollywood, Claude, Texas, has a big past for such an unassuming community!  Three films, The Sundowners, Hud, and Sunshine Christmas were filmed in Claude.  The Claude News was the weekly newspaper produced when the Claude Argus and the Goodnight News merged at the turn of the 20th-century. 

 

Thanks to The Handbook of Texas for its rich biography of Claude! 

Across Texas, Across Time: Newspaper Recipes for your Thanksgiving Table

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As you plan shopping lists for Thanksgiving, an easy place to find old recipes that will make your Thanksgiving meal new is the Texas Digital Newspaper Program.

Pickled eggs are an easy Thanksgiving table appetizer, can be transported to a friend’s house, and are safe to leave out on the table for hours.  This Telegraph and Texas Register recipe dates from November 9, 1842–before Thanksgiving was an official holiday in America!  This recipe was intended to accompany meats stored through the winter as a nourishing yet tasty side dish, in an era before refrigeration existed to keep food from spoiling over long periods of time. 

The Schulenburg Sticker bring us “The Kitchen Cabinet” column, from November 18, 1921.  This recipe column suggests that “a few pieces of nicely smoked trout added to a potato salad give a flavor that is especially appetizing.”  These recipes take advantage of common foods that would have been in a 1921 Texas kitchen in the late autumn.  “Usually two or three vegetables with the meat course is considered enough.”  Ranging from suggestions on cooking sweet potatoes attractively, to fruit- and coffee-flavored desserts, to recipes for different varieties of squash that were readily available in the Texas Hill Country during the 1920s, any of Nellie Maxwell’s recipes would add a unique experience to a large family Thanksgiving.

“Meet the Bean Family,” from the November 25, 1943, issue of The Tulia Herald, states, “[Dried beans] are food pinch hitters for meat, fish, eggs, and cheese when supplies of these No. 1 protein foods are short.”  Written during a time of war rationing, this bean recipe list illustrates an era and a region when resources were limited and when sensible planning of meals was a necessity.  These recipes could add a unique twist to any 2013 Thanksgiving feast. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our First Full-Color Newspapers from the New Scanner!

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All issues of The Meridian Tribune from 1935 have been uploaded as the Texas Digital Newspaper Program’s first newspaper title digitized on our new scanner.  Master images are 24-bit, full-color TIFFs, from which OCR has been generated and derivatives are viewable as full newspapers, such as this issue from April 5, 1935, on The Portal to Texas History.  Through a Tocker grant awarded to the Meridian Public Library, over 60 years of The Meridian Tribune will be included on the Texas Digital Newspaper Program.  

Meridian serves as the county seat of Bosque County.  It was selected as the county seat in 1854 due to its location at the center of the county the early founders had mapped out, according to the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas Online.

These newspapers are fully-text searchable and will be accessible to researchers for years to come. 

 

 

 

The National Endowment for the Humanities Announces Newest NDNP Grant Recipients

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The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is:

“. . . a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories” (http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/). 

University of North Texas Libraries has participated in NDNP as the lead institution in Texas to digitize historic Texas newspaper titles, and as the technical partner with the Oklahoma Historical Society and University of New Mexico to digitize early newspapers from these states.  The NEH has announced recipients for the 2013-2015 award cycle, and the Oklahoma Historical Society has received the award for a third cycle.  After the third cycle for Oklahoma has been completed, the NEH will have supported over 300,000 pages of Oklahoma newspapers to be digitized and made accessible via both Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) and The Gateway to Oklahoma History (http://gateway.okhistory.org).  This third grant to the Oklahoma Historical Society represents another successful collaboration between the rich archive stored at OHS and the high technological standards practiced at UNT Libraries.  Sarah Lynn Fisher, the technical coordinator for the Oklahoma-NDNP project, has been working at UNT Libraries since March 2008, when she first began work on a massive yearbook digitization project to digitize yearbooks from the Abilene Library Consortium for inclusion on The Portal to Texas History. 

Congratulations to Oklahoma Historical Society and Sarah Lynn Fisher on a job well done!

 

 

The Digital Newspaper Team Welcomes its Newest Member

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 The Digital Newspaper Team welcomed its newest member this week when the A0 planetary scanner went online.  Last week, the newspaper team attended a one-day training workshop to learn how to scan newspapers on the scanner.  This week, we are scheduling the first projects to be scanned on it.  The planetary scanner can digitize newspapers in full color, which provides us with the opportunity to showcase the beautiful color artwork and comic pages in Texas newspapers.  As a result of adding this new scanner to our production line, we can now create a parallel paper-scanning workflow, which allows us to manage two analog newspaper-digitization processes for increased efficiency.  While we are very proud of our microfilm scanner, we are very excited about the color potential for the A0 scanner, and we are also excited to be able to do twice the work in the same amount of time!

 

A0 Planetary Scanner