Historians like James McGrath Morris, Joshua Kendell and Graham Hodges are proving that “campaigns to digitize newspapers — Readex’s “American Historical Newspapers” available by subscription at research universities, or the free “Chronicling America” collection available at the Library of Congress — have the potential to revolutionize biographical research.”
In his biography, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, Morris debunks the myth that Joseph Pulitzer “stumbled into success, buying The New York World on a lark in 1883.” He does it by using historical newspaper databases to uncover “evidence that he (Pulitzer) had been staying in New York City hotels a year before his famous acquisition, scouting out possible deals.” Hidden gems are also being found. While researching his recently published biography of Noah Webster, The Forgotten Founding Father, Joshua Kendall used the Readex database to “dig up numerous articles by Noah Webster that weren’t part of the carefully curated collection bequeathed by his descendants.” And Graham Hodges discovered that “perhaps the biggest dividend of digging in digitized newspapers was the light it could shed on figures whose (personal) papers weren’t considered important enough to preserve: African-Americans, for example, or women.” In his biography ofDavid Ruggles, an important but largely forgotten black abolitionist active in the Underground Railroad, Hodges uses digitized newspapers to “reconstructed the elaborate networks that linked Ruggles with other, better known activists”
With these online tools at their disposal the lone biographer can make research altering discoveries with “far greater ease and speed than an army of research assistants. In the process, the fusty, antiquated art of researching and writing biographies may come to seem, of all things, cutting-edge.”
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