Morning Star, January 22, 1921

Although the majority of the newspapers in this collection are from New Orleans, including the bilingual L’Abeille de la Nouvelle Orleans, or The New Orleans Bee, also included are two editions of a Civil War era newspaper from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and an 1896 newspaper from Bayern, Germany.

The collection also contains a copy of a famously reprinted newspaper edition, Vol. II, No.88 of The Ulster County Gazette. The edition, dated January 4, 1800, was one of the most reprinted newspapers in the 19th century. Special to The Ulster County Gazette that day was a commemorative poem, “On the Death of General Washington (by a young lady).” A favored collectible, it is speculated that this edition was reprinted for the 25th anniversary of Washington’s death. It was a known popular keepsake at the festivities surrounding the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, and over the years proliferated upwards to perhaps a million copies from its earliest days into the 1920s.

The Vicksburg Daily Citizen editions in the collection are believed to have been printed in 1862 during General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign. Due to the scarcity of printing materials during the Civil War, six editions were printed on wallpaper. A “southern American phenomenon” the wallpaper newspaper editions in the collection are dated June 30 and July 2, 1863. At the conclusion of Grant’s campaign, the Union troops included a note to the July 2, 1863 edition, printed two days later that noted, “This is the last wall–paper edition, and is, excepting this note, from the types as we found them. It will be valuable hereafter as a curiosity.”