Chronicling America vs Currents

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.

Currents API returns real-time and historical global news as JSON, with search filterable by language, keyword, country, category, and date range. A free account includes 1,000 requests/day — enough for prototyping — before paid plans raise the ceiling for production traffic. Authentication is a single API key passed on every request.