Thanks to the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society who sponsored this digitization project–and champion of all things related to southern Oregon history, Maureen Battistella–we are continuing to grow our collection of newspapers from that part of the state.

• Ashland Daily Evening Tidings (1890)
• Ashland Tidings (1894-1895; 1911-1912)
• Ashland Daily Tidings (1919-1921)

The Ashland Tidings is also a good example of how often newspaper titles change over time, which can be a challenge for cataloging and researching them. Each new title change requires a new LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number), which is similar to the unique ISBN number for books, which means we have to create separate entries for each title in Historic Oregon Newspapers. So even though Ashland Tidings, Ashland Daily Evening Tidings, and Ashland Daily Tidings are pretty much the same newspaper, the Library of Congress and our own serials catalogers have to treat them as distinct. This can be frustrating for researchers who might wonder which title to search for a given topic.

The most efficient way to search Historic Oregon Newspapers for a topic in a specific city is to search simultaneously across all of the newspapers from that city. To do that, start in Advanced Search, scroll down to the section Limit By, and select a city from the drop-down menu (see below).You can also change the dates to limit the results to a particular date range.

The North Coast Times Eagle is a new addition to the Historic Oregon Newspapers database. Issues from this title cover 1979-2007. It was published in Wheeler, Astoria, and Cannon Beach, and has the spunky, DIY feel of a community newsletter with a global conscience. North Coast Times Eagle has numerous articles about the local fishing industry, the threat of nuclear arms, investigations into violence against women, editorials about racism at home and abroad, as well as poetry, local art, and cartoons.

The Oregon State Library has been a long-standing supporter of the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program through its LSTA grant funding to Oregon libraries to fund newspaper digitization. Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funding is allocated from the federal government to states to support libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. In 2022-2023, we were glad to partner with seven organizations with LSTA grants to digitize newspapers from around the state:

• Cottage Grove Sentinel (1924-1929), sponsored by the Cottage Grove Museum
• Gresham Outlook (1911-1928), sponsored by the Multnomah County Library
• Hermiston Herald (1915-1945), sponsored by the Hermiston Public Library
• Hood River Glacier (1924-1928), sponsored by the Hood River Public Library
• Illinois Valley News (1937-1952), sponsored by the Josephine Community Library District
• Opportunity News (1965-1968), sponsored by Oregon Historical Society
• Toveri (1916-1921), sponsored by the Astoria Public Library

Issues from 2015-2016 of the Baker County Record-Courier newspapers are now available in Historic Oregon Newspapers. These are relatively recent issues compared to the the myriad historical newspapers we provide in the database, but it’s a great example of how ODNP digitization projects can focus on whatever content someone wants to make available from any time period. In this case, the director of the Baker County Library, Perry Stokes, had 77 print issues of the Record-Courier in his library, and he wanted to make sure they could be accessible and preserved for future research. He sent the issues to us in Eugene, where we digitized and processed them for access in Historic Oregon Newspapers.

Our collection of newspapers from the coastal community of Coquille continues to grow, thanks to the efforts of our stalwart champion, Bert Dunn. The latest additions are issues of the Coquille Valley Herald from 1936-1946. Small-town newspapers are full of interesting regional history, but it’s also fascinating to see local responses to global events, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States entry into World War II in December 1941.

We’re pleased to announce the addition of several new historical titles from Scio:

• Scio News (1870-1871)
• Scio Press (1890)
• Scio Weekly Press (1890-1897)
• The Santiam News (1897-1917)
• Intermountain Tribune and Linn County Agriculturalist
• Scio Tribune (1919-1925)
• The Scio tribune and Santiam news, consolidated (1917-1919)
• The Scio Tribune (1915-1917)

The Scio Public Library sponsored this digitization project, which included microfilm and digital photography of original newsprint.

UO Libraries recently contributed six Oregon prison newspapers to American Prison Newspapers, a new open-access collection available through Reveal Digital, a project of JSTOR.

American Prisons, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside provides free online access to over 450 newspapers published from U.S. prisons.

UO Libraries provided the following titles, which were digitized from the original paper copies held in Special Collections & University Archives:

• Detour (24 issues, 1960-1965); Oregon State Correctional Institution
• Inside-Out (1 issue, 1972); unknown facility
• Lakota Oyate-ki (11 issues, 1973-1988); Lakota Indian Club, Oregon State Penitentiary
• Lend a Hand (52 issues, 1908-1922); Oregon State Penitentiary
• Shadows  (159 issues, 1935-1967); Oregon State Penitentiary
• The Walled-Street Journal (2 issues, 1969-1971); Oregon State Penitentiary

Reveal Digital develops open access primary source collections from underrepresented 20^th century voices of dissent. Reveal Digital partners with libraries, museums, historical societies, and individual collections to curate and source materials, which they digitize and host on the JSTOR website.

Post written by Allia Service, UO class of 2022.

This year the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project (ODNP) website surpassed 2 million pages online! In total, we uploaded 704,088 pages. That includes 112,752 pages uploaded by our in-house digitization and digital preservation unit, 446,609 from the iArchives embargo release, and 144,727 pages from the Oregon Daily Emerald digitization project. Which completes the highly requested Daily Emerald digitization project which is now fully digitized. 

This year we uploaded a total of 13 new titles including: 

• Rogue River Courier (Grants Pass, OR) 
• Talent News 
• Jacksonville sentinel (Jacksonville, OR) 
• Jacksonville post (Jacksonville, OR) 
• Grants Pass Daily Courier (Grants Pass, OR) 

The ODNP website had 243,788 user sessions this year, and each session lasted an average of 5 minutes 9 seconds. A session is the period a user is actively engaging with ODNP, so that means users engaged with ONDP for approximately 1,255,508 minutes (or 872 days) last year! During that time, they viewed 1,878,901 pages. 

Preservation After Destruction: 

Our focus this past year was on funding institutions that were impacted by the 2020 Labor Day weekend fires. With this funding, we digitized the Talent News and newspapers from Scio and the Santiam region (online soon!). 

Talent News was a semimonthly newspaper published from 1892-1894 in Talent, Oregon, one of four Oregon cities which was substantially destroyed by the 2020 Labor Day fires. As Talent rebuilds, we can look back at its early history through the Talent News. 

While Talent News included some local news items, it mostly featured poetry, opinion, and other non-news items. In the late 19th century, newspapers were one of the few sources of entertainment. We often think of them as basic ways to receive hard news, but Talent News is a great example of the diverse role they played. This poem from 1893 takes a critical eye to “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” apparently it was already an old-fashioned nursery rhyme 130 years ago! 

The Talent News also served as a dating service for at least one “young lady, whose auburn ringlets have waved in the gentle zephyrs of 27 summers.” On November 1st 1893, Katie Didd placed a notice in the Talent News looking for a husband who was temperate, a non-smoker, and willing to work hard. Over the intervening months, several eligible bachelors wrote letters putting themselves forward as candidates. 

Katie was impressed by both letters, although skeptical that W.B.A.’s horse could possibly be worth 1000 pounds of gold. Of W.W. she said “’aint you a short fellow!” but luckily for him she “like[s] short folks.” But she didn’t make a decision, instead she left both men hanging, waiting to hear from a few other men before she made any vows. Although a few more letters were exchanged, there seems to be no conclusion to Katie’s story, at least not in the Talent News 

To read all of the letters between Katie and her suitors, follow the links below. 

• Nov. 1st 1893,  
• Nov. 15th 1893,  
• Dec. 1st 1893 (page 1 and page 4),  
• Dec 15th 1893,   
• Jan 1st 1894 

Thank you to our donors and newspaper digitization enthusiasts who make ODNP possible!  

 This post was created by Allia Service, class of 2022.

The history of home cooking, and women’s household labor is often obscured by a lack of obvious sources. ODNP offers a window into this world through women’s pages and food sections, which were both common in 20th Century newspapers.  The Sunday Oregonian included a cooking advice column written by Lillian Tingle, that provides an intimate view into the home kitchens of Oregon women.  

In the winter and spring of 2022, I researched home cooking in Oregon through Tingle’s home cooking correspondence column (1908-1929). I first wrote my undergraduate history capstone, and then created a digital humanities (DH) project. The project centers on women from across the Pacific Northwest who wrote to Tingle with questions that ranged from broad to specific. What united all of Tingle’s correspondents was that they were navigating big changes to U.S. food ways as more women had to cook for themselves instead of relying on servants and home economics blossomed. My project includes a map representing the geographic distribution of Tingle’s correspondents over time and a historical food blog, which investigates Tingle’s recipes, the relationship between Tingle and her correspondents, and connections between Tingle’s column-community and modern online food content.  

For this project, I read hundreds of Tingle’s columns between 1910 and 1925.  The Sunday Oregonian was long, usually 50-100 pages. ODNP’s search tools helped me quickly find the columns so I could use my time for research instead of slogging through hundreds of pages I didn’t need. I enjoyed getting a sense of questions and anxieties that plagued housewives in the kitchen. For the food blog, I recreated some of Tingle’s most popular recipes and highlighted some of the best stories from the column.   

One of my posts focuses on a strange fad that swept through Portland in 1912 called “rose beads.” The first few times I read about rose beads I had no idea what they were. Since Tingle’s column focused almost exclusively on food, I assumed they were edible, maybe a dessert? In fact, they are decorative beads made from rose petals. The fad is somewhat incomprehensible from a modern standpoint. The beads usually turn out black or grayish, sometimes dyed red or pink, shriveled and decidedly homemade.  

And yet, Tingle’s column was overrun with requests. On July 21st, 1912, alone 6 out of 8 correspondents wrote in with questions about rose beads. Tingle became increasingly exasperated as her column, previously full of recipes for bread, canned food and cake, was hijacked with pleas for help with an inedible decoration. She wrote in 1912, “When the rose bead fever seizes a victim nothing can be done but provide the necessary recipes and materials and wait in patience for the attack to pass.” Even a “puzzled bachelor” wrote in July of 1912 to express his curiosity:  

Both Tingle and the puzzled bachelor are dismissive of women and their hobbies. Men also participate in seemingly frivolous fads and trends, but society generally does not judge them as harshly. Although after making the beads for myself, I have to agree with the puzzled bachelor, the roses were far more beautiful before being mangled and mummified. 

Women’s Pages and ODNP 

Tingle’s column provided an invaluable resource to hundreds of people in the early 20th Century and represents a transition toward reliance on ‘experts’ to learn household skills like cooking. It gives us a window into a period of transition, especially for middle-class housewives both in cities and rural areas. The Sunday Oregonian was a regional paper and many people outside of the Portland area only got the Sunday edition, which is reflected in the makeup of Tingle’s correspondents. Over the columns I studied, about 50% of correspondents were from Portland. The rest were scattered among 214 localities across the west. Which indicates that Tingle’s appeal, and the appeal of domestic science wasn’t just for city women. To investigate this geographic diversity, I created an interactive map that displays the distribution of Tingle’s correspondents over time.   

Tingle’s column was part of a robust women’s section in The Sunday Oregonian. Unlike smaller Oregon papers from the time, it is full of illustrations, graphic advertisements, and content beyond standard news. The Sunday Oregonian is far from the only paper in ODNP to include a women’s section or food journalism. According to historian Kimberly Wilmot Voss, women’s pages in newspapers started appearing in the late 19th Century, and often covered society, fashion, ‘women’s news,’ and food. Food pages didn’t become prominent until the 1950s, but food columns and sections certainly existed before the mid-century boom. They were sometimes included in the women’s page or sometimes a separate entity, but they were often written by women. The women’s pages and food sections were both places were women journalists innovated and participated in important, often overlooked journalism, and they were cages that newspaper editors used to prevent women from accessing the prestigious ‘hard news’ sections. Here is a list of just a few ODNP papers that include women’s pages and/or food sections during some, or all, of their run, there are undoubtedly many more:  

• Klamath news 1926-1931 
• Oregon city enterprise 1891-1922 
• La Grande evening observer 1904-1959  
• Roseburg news review 1920-1945 
• Capital journal 1919-1980  
• The Oregon daily journal 1902-1972 
• The Oregon statesman 1918-1994 
• East Oregonian 1888-2019 (From 1916-1918 this paper includes a common supplement promoted by the federal government called “daily chats with the housewife” about war rationing) 

In “The Significance of Trivia,” celebrated historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich talks about why the history of household labor is important and how she found historical meaning in the diary of a midwife in which previous historians saw no value. She quotes a history of childbirth which concluded that the diary “is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes.” By taking both a qualitative and quantitative approach to the diary, Ulrich found enormous meaning, and encouraged historians to pay “attention to the mundanities (and profundities) of housework.”   

One of the goals of this project was to encourage more investigation into the history of home cooking as seen in newspapers, since ODNP is open access, it is an incredible resource where anyone can do this kind of research. What we eat, how we think about food, and the people who prepare it can give us a window into an understudied aspect of American social and political history.   

The Oregon Daily Emerald is an independent newspaper, produced by students at the University of Oregon. Issues from 1909-1952 are now available to view on our website. Starting in 1909 the paper was named the Oregon Emerald and ran twice a week until 1920 when it was renamed the Oregon Daily Emerald and published five days a week during the fall, winter, and spring terms. The Oregon Emerald (1909-1920) is available here and the Oregon Daily Emerald has been digitized through 1952 and is available here. The entire archive will be digitized and online soon! 

The start of the fall term at U of O was chronicled each year in the Emerald. In September 1933, amidst news about fall registration, sports, and the state board of higher education, one columnist took the time to explain campus slang to incoming freshmen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

World War II affected most aspects of life on campus, including the Emerald. With most college-age men in the armed forces, women took over most positions on the Emerald staff, going from a significant minority to a comfortable majority. In October of 1943, the Emerald reported that fall registration dropped 35% from 1942 and women made up 83% of the student body.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some things never change, football was always a prominent feature of back-to-school coverage. In September 1948 the Emerald ran this photo of right guard Sam Nevilis  as part of its analysis of the Ducks’ preparedness for their season opener against Santa Barbara. 

The Oregon Emerald and the Oregon Daily Emerald are a valuable resource for exploring the history of U of O and we are excited that it is available on our website and to digitize the remainder of the archive soon! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blog post compiled and edited by Allia Service, University of Oregon undergraduate student and Libraries student employee.