This month’s content update highlights a rather eclectic assortment of newspapers supporting interests as diverse as shipbuilding, farming, aging soldiers, and temperance. They’re all found in Newspapers.com‘s rapidly growing collection of publications from North Carolina.
The Friend of Temperance is a weekly, family newspaper “devoted to temperance, morality and literature.”” As expected, its editors had plenty to say about alcohol, referred to in one article as “the water of death,” being sold through “vice and misery generating institutions.” But, there are also many literary columns typical of the 1860s and 70s, as well as brief and pithy odds and ends, where we learn that women with hazel eyes make the most agreeable companions.
Our Living and Our Dead is a post-Civil War literary and historical periodical with a regular front-page column of Southern War Poetry. Self-described as featuring testimony from the battlefields it offered up North Carolina regimental histories, extracts from the adjutant general’s books, and reports on which regiments were lacking histories. In a July 1873 issue, the Nicknames of Cities were published as a lighter piece, reflecting how much has changed in over 140 years.
The Progressive Farmer is a weekly farm and home newspaper for the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. On the front page of every issue is a large photo and a table of contents demanding, “Don’t Fail to Read.” And you’ll want to, for if you don’t turn the pages, you may miss out on articles about dipping chickens for lice where Uncle Jo recommends using a kerosene emulsion. Or, you may be interested in learning what represents leisure for the farm woman where “a hundred Virginia girls tell how she might get it.” Leisure, that is. (Spoiler alert: It helps to be organized and understand priorities, even back in 1914.) A similar, earlier publication also appeals to both sexes, but it seems that women were more of the target audience for The Field and Fireside, a paper “devoted to all the highest and noblest purposes of pure and dignified literature.” It even advertised for polite southern literature with an eye-catching graphic.
Our last eclectic title, The North Carolina Shipbuilder, was published during World War II for employees of the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company. Like The Canal Record a newspaper we wrote about last month, it is purely a company publication. Articles include news of employees—marriages, obituaries, joining the service—inspiring company moral boosters, and photos of women pipe coverers.
Enjoy exploring many more intriguing titles from North Carolina and the other forty-nine U.S. states on Newspapers.com.