News — entry 003 of 17
Chronicling America
Chronicling America is the Library of Congress's searchable archive of historic U.S. newspaper pages published through 1963, built from the National Digital Newspaper Program. As of August 2025 its data moved fully onto the general loc.gov JSON/YAML API, retiring the old chroniclingamerica.loc.gov endpoints in favor of structured search, batch, and full-text access — no API key is required, though heavy use should self-throttle.
Chronicling America is the Library of Congress's searchable archive of historic U.S. newspaper pages, served off the general loc.gov JSON API rather than a dedicated newspaper backend. A live GET this run against /collections/chronicling-america/?q=hurricane&fo=json&at=results returned genuine full-text search results with no registration, key, or authentication of any kind.
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<a href="https://greatapis.com/api/chronicling-america/"><img src="https://greatapis.com/badge/chronicling-america.svg" alt="Scored 94 on greatapis.com"></a>Auth quickstart
- No API key, signup, or credit card required. A live GET this run against the search endpoint returned real newspaper-page JSON with
access-control-allow-origin: *on the response and no credentials sent — just self-throttle on heavy use, per loc.gov's own etiquette guidance.
Your key is stored only in this browser (localStorage) and sent directly to the API — never to greatapis.
Full-text search across digitized newspaper pages
GEThttps://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/?q=hurricane&fo=json&at=results
{"results":[{"id":"http://www.loc.gov/resource/sn88083718/1936-06-28/ed-1/?sp=4","title":"Image 4 of McAllen daily monitor (McAllen, Texas), June 28, 1936","date":"1936-06-28","partof":["mcallen daily monitor (mcallen, texas) 19??-1937","serial and government publications division","chronicling america"],"number_lccn":["sn88083718"],"subject":["brownsville","mcallen","united states","texas","newspapers"],"url":"https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn88083718/1936-06-28/ed-1/?sp=4&q=hurricane"},{"...":"more result objects, same shape"}]}The result shown is trimmed to id/title/date/partof/number_lccn/subject/url; the live payload carries dozens more fields per result (OCR description text, image_url tile URLs at several resolutions, location/location_city/location_county facets, batch and digitization metadata) — at=results only strips the page-level wrapper (facets, pagination, breadcrumbs), not per-item bulk.
Try it
Developer reference
https://www.loc.gov- GET/collections/chronicling-america/?q={query}&fo=json
- GET/collections/chronicling-america/titles/?fo=json
Gotchas & limits
fo=jsonis mandatory, not optional — a live GET this run against the same URL withfo=jsonremoved returnedHTTP 403(HTML), even with a browserUser-Agentset. Without it loc.gov assumes a human browsing the site, not an API client.- Without
at=results, the same search returns a much larger payload — a live GET this run against?q=hurricane&fo=json&c=2(noatparam) returned nearly 1.9 MB of JSON for 2 results, versus under 9 KB withat=resultsadded, because the full response also nests facets, pagination, breadcrumbs, and site-navigation JSON alongside the actual results. - An out-of-range page number does not 404 — a live GET this run against
?fo=json&c=1&sp=999999returnedHTTP 302redirecting tohttps://www.loc.gov/error/bad-request/index-depth, an HTML error page, not a JSON error body. - CORS is a bare wildcard — a live GET this run with
Origin: https://example.comstill returnedaccess-control-allow-origin: *, so this API can be called directly from client-side JavaScript on any domain. - As of August 2025 this collection's API moved fully onto the general loc.gov search endpoint, retiring the older dedicated
chroniclingamerica.loc.govAPI — documentation or code samples referencing that old host are stale.