Search digitized historic U.S. newspaper pages via the Chronicling America collection on the loc.gov API
domain: loc.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Note that the legacy chroniclingamerica.loc.gov dedicated API (2007-2025) has been retired; as of 2025 the Chronicling America collection is accessible exclusively through the general loc.gov JSON/YAML API.
Query the loc.gov API's search endpoints scoped to the Chronicling America collection, requesting JSON or YAML output as documented at loc.gov/apis/json-and-yaml/.
No API key or authentication is required for the loc.gov API, but the Library of Congress strongly encourages self-imposed rate limiting to avoid being throttled.
Consult the 'Guide to Chronicling America Newspaper Datasets and API Access' at guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america for collection-specific query patterns and available bulk OCR/batch data.
For large-scale text mining, prefer the published bulk data/OCR datasets over paginating the search API for every page.
Known gotchas
Any code or tutorial referencing the old dedicated chroniclingamerica.loc.gov API endpoints is stale post-2025 migration -- re-verify against the current loc.gov API docs before relying on it.
Exceeding loc.gov's informal rate limits gets requests blocked outright rather than merely throttled.
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