Sites like Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s database of over 20,000,000 digitized newspaper pages, and Virginia Chronicle, the Library of Virginia’s digital newspaper database, have opened a world of access to information. Digitized historical newspapers are invaluable for so many reasons, and if searched effectively, are a rich resource of material for a nearly endless range of topics. But when reading historical newspapers, one doesn’t have to look far before discovering racial and ethnic descriptions in print that are painful and offensive to read. Even a quick search of a small and random selection of old newspapers quickly turns up headlines, articles, and ads like these:
These clippings, taken from a variety of Virginia newspapers published from 1769 to 1945, are a stark reminder of how accepted standards of language have changed over the past two centuries. Because language has evolved, when searching digitized historical newspapers about topics related to race and ethnicity, researchers must be aware of terms that were in common use at the time they were written in order to successfully uncover relevant information.
For this reason, members of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), the program responsible for Chronicling America, created the Race and Ethnicity Keyword Thesaurus for Chronicling America, a thesaurus of racial and ethnic terms to help educators, students and researchers keyword search eighteenth and early nineteenth century newspapers most effectively. The thesaurus can be found on the NEH’s EDSITEment site, which provides free resources for teachers, students, and parents seeking K-12 education materials related to history, social studies, literature, foreign languages, arts, and culture.
Harmful Language Warning Pop-Up on NDNP
Though the Race and Ethnicity Thesaurus is meant to serve as a guide to exploring topics related to race and ethnicity specifically on Chronicling America, users may find it helpful for all kinds of historical research, as the language used in historical newspapers often mirrors the language used in other historical records.
To prepare students and researchers for what they will find in the thesaurus, a “Harmful Language Warning” pop-up appears on each new page, not only to warn users of potentially harmful language but to remind them “to take a physical and mental pause when reading these words to consider the ways this language has been used to oppress communities of people.”
The thesaurus includes sections titled, “Starting Your Search,” which discusses keyword searching, “Working with the Thesaurus,” which details how the thesaurus is organized, and “Thesaurus Categories and Keyword Lists,” which provides general categories and within those categories related keywords commonly used to describe race and ethnicity in historical newspapers. For each keyword term, there are related terms, definitions of the term, historical background on the term, and examples of the term found on Chronicling America. For example, within the thesaurus’s heading “African American Keywords” there is a list of sub-heading keywords including “Slave,” “Mulatto,” “Colored,” and “Negro”—descriptive terms commonly found in older newspapers.
Being aware of the language that was used in the past can bring a vastly wider array of potential leads to the surface for researchers. To demonstrate the importance of accurate keyword searching, if we look at a search of the phrase “African American Education” in Chronicling America, it produces only one result. But if we instead search the phrase “Negro Education,” Chronicling America returns nearly 12,000 results. Likewise, a search of the phrase, “African American Schools” returns no results, while a search of “Negro Schools” returns over 22,000 results. Although “African American” is a term familiar to people today, these search results reveal how infrequently it was used in newspapers published before 1963, the cutoff date for content on Chronicling America. Using “African American” in a search means missing out on literally thousands of potentially useful research hits.
The language found in old newspapers can be difficult to encounter, but the Race and Ethnicity Keyword Thesaurus exists to help teachers, students and researchers get the most out of databases like Chronicling America and to assist them in doing the critical work of uncovering the countless stories buried in the pages of old newspapers.
