Antebellum Periodicals Metadata
This is a CSV file of the basic metadata for the American Antiquarian Society’s Historical Periodicals Collection from 1821-1865, drawn from the EBSCO coverage lists.
I’ve made several improvements. First, I added geographic coordinates for publishing locations. Second, I eliminated some of the redundancy from the original files, though some remains. I wish that the genre field were more consistent and more consolidated, but I think the only way to do that would be to go through entry by entry.
A few clarifications. Start and End values pertain to AAS holdings and not necessarily to a periodical’s actual start and end dates – though often the two correspond (even more so, of course, if one rounds up to the month or year). The AAS site says that this data reflects “most” of their collection. I merged entries with the same Title, City, and State only if they were less than a year apart in order to preserve separate entries for new periodicals with repeated names. The downside is that periodicals for which the AAS holdings are thin across multiple years are still listed as separate entries. If AAS/EBSCO listed name changes as separate entries they are maintained here.
I’ve found that this data works well as a sample in an introductory mapping and geospatial analysis workshop; I post it here because I think it could be put to other uses as well.
I’m not aware of a readily accessible, more complete, digitized version of antebellum periodicals metadata. If such a thing exists (surely it must?) I would be happy to learn of it!