Alaska Digital Newspaper Program

Archived at the Library of Congress

The Anchorage Daily Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer, August 12, 1916, featured this photo: “Scene along the government railway on Knik Arm. Photo by the Sydney Laurance Co.” The article under the photo notes the Secretary of the Interior promising docking facilities at Anchorage.

An outstanding collection of Alaskan newspapers is available to read free online at Alaska’s Digital Newspaper Program, with over 150,000 pages of Alaskan historical newspapers from across the state ranging in date from 1898-1963. Since 2016, the Alaska State Library has been participating in the National Digital Newspaper Program, a collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, designed to digitize and provide free access to historical newspapers from across the United States in Chronicling America, the text-searchable online database.

You can view the currently available Alaskan newspapers at Chronicling America, a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.

The masthead of the Alaska Daily Empire, predecessor to the Juneau Empire, is seen on Oct. 26, 1918, the date the steamship Princess Sophia sank on Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal.

The news articles are fascinating to read, capturing everything from the mundane daily happenings in every part of Alaska to the riveting headlines which comprise our history, often told in harrowing detail and including first-person eyewitness interviews. Photographs, advertising, editorial opinions and much more bring history to life in the pages of these newspapers. The supplementary Alaska Digital Newspaper Project provides more information and updates and includes a blog, a listing of newspapers online, a map of locations and other helpful information.

January 31, 1925 headlines reported on the historic Serum Run, when sled dog teams carried diphtheria antitoxin to Nome.

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