Search the Library of Congress full text.

Covers every collection at once: newspapers 1736-1963 in more than a dozen languages, plus digitised books and manuscripts.

Bare words are ANDed and "quoted phrases" match exactly. There is no boolean OR and no NOT - those words, a leading minus, parentheses and | are all silently stripped - so each variant of a term needs its own search.

Results resolve to individual pages. Each carries a reference that is both the citation URL and the argument for snippets_loc and get_loc_text.

Show a query in context on one page.

The cheap way to judge a search result without downloading it: returns the matched terms in {braces} with the surrounding sentences, and a citation URL. Works for any page-level reference, but not for a whole item.

Download a page's OCR text, returning the path to the cached file.

Use when snippets are not enough and the whole page has to be read or grepped. Hyphenation broken across line ends is rejoined, so the cached text greps the way the search index matched.