Search Historical Newspapers
libofcongress_search_newspapersRead-only
Search historical newspaper pages in the Chronicling America corpus. Returns matching pages with the opening of each page's OCR text (~500 characters), publication title, date, the states LOC indexes the title under, and the page URL needed for libofcongress_get_newspaper_page. Filters by keyword, date range, US state, and newspaper title. The excerpt is the page's first lines, not the text around the match: to read where the query occurs, call libofcongress_get_newspaper_page with the returned url field and this query as its match, which returns the passages around each occurrence; omit match for the full page text. OCR quality varies: 19th-century and degraded materials may contain fragmented or garbled text.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| page | No | 1-indexed page number for paginating results. | |
| limit | No | Results per page. Default 25. A page holds at most 100 results: a larger limit (up to 1000) is served as a 100-result page, and page then counts 100-result pages. | |
| query | Yes | Keyword search across OCR text and newspaper metadata. | |
| state | No | Filter to newspapers LOC indexes under this US state: the full state name (e.g., "oklahoma", "new york") or its two-letter postal code (e.g., "OK", "NY"), case-insensitive. Use "district of columbia" (or "DC") for Washington, D.C.; "washington" means Washington state. City and county names match nothing. | |
| date_end | No | End of the date filter, inclusive, in the same forms as date_start (e.g., 1920 or "1912-04-16"). A year or month ends on its last day, so "1912-04" runs through April 30. Omit to run through the current year. | |
| date_start | No | Start of the date filter, inclusive: an integer year (e.g., 1900) or a "YYYY", "YYYY-MM", or "YYYY-MM-DD" string (e.g., "1912-04-15"); month and day may be one or two digits. A year or month starts on its first day. Omit for no lower bound. | |
| newspaper_title | No | Filter to one newspaper. Pass the newspaper_title value of a libofcongress_search_newspapers result exactly (case-insensitive), e.g., "new-york tribune (new york [n.y.]) 1866-1924" — the full catalog title with place and run. A shortened title such as "New-York Tribune" matches nothing. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| page | No | Current 1-indexed page number. | |
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| items | No | Newspaper page results matching the search query and filters. | |
| pages | No | Total retrievable pages. For result sets larger than LOC will page through (~100,000 pages) this is capped, and a notice discloses how to reach the rest (partition by date/state). | |
| total | No | Total number of matching newspaper pages in the result set. | |
| notice | No | Recovery hint when results are empty or a page is out of range — echoes applied filters and suggests how to broaden — plus disclosure of a capped limit or of the retrieval ceiling. Absent on ordinary result pages. | |
| has_next | No | True when a retrievable next page follows this one. Never promises a page past LOC's ~100,000-item retrieval ceiling. | |
| totalCount | No | Total matching newspaper pages — mirrors output.total for agent reasoning. | |
| effectiveLimit | No | The page size actually served when limit exceeded the per-call cap of 100. Absent when limit was within the cap. | |
| effectiveQuery | No | The keyword query as submitted to the Chronicling America API, after trimming. |