Clio Wired (History 696)

One such database is African American Newspaper: 19 Century This database contains the following newspapers: Freedom’s Journal, Provincial Freeman, The Colored American (Weekly Advocate), Frederick Douglass Paper, The North Star, The National Era, and The Christian Recorder.

Using this database, I could envision a project that explores the theme of “racial upliftment” in the freed black community during the antebellum period. This project can take make turns and can answer many questions. Did it seem to be more important than struggling for equal rights and access? Did freed blacks focus more on that subject than on emancipation?

The Accessible Archives INC. provides the researcher with a “full-text” search component that is unparalleled in finding aids. Using Boolean and string search tools, the reader can get a precision only available in this format. Here are some possible search options that might reveal beneficial results:

Uplift* - using the wild card would yield the results of uplift with multiple suffixes.
Uplift* NEAR race – using the connector NEAR would yield the results where race and uplift* were close to each other. The hits would be ranked in the order of the proximity of those words.

Of course the standard Boolean search terms and use of quotation to search for phrases are available.

Besides the precision of search, The Accessible Archives INC. also benefits the researcher by the ability to search numerous black newspapers at the same time. This makes it a richer process-by adding the layer of comparison-than using searching one newspaper or than by searching one newspaper at a time. Still if the researcher wanted to explore themes in one particular periodical it is possible to limit the search to one particular newspaper.

I did find it disappointing that PDF’s style documents were not also included with the newspaper texts. This, I think, hampers the serendipitous discovery that may take place during researching. Also some form of context is provided by viewing the whole newspaper page. The researcher might also want to visit an archive for these
purposes