Having had time to more extensively read your excellent answer to our
northern culture question, we are impressed. We are also curious as to
some of your search terms. THey seem to be databases, but we're unsure
how you used them to find such rich material. Also, having closed the
question before we posted the tip to it, we'd like to apply that tip
to this question, since your answer was so good. Thanks again,

Narrative

I used the Cornell Library's Making of America database of 19th
Century peridoicals:

Making of America
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_browse.html

This list of periodical is small, but very good. Most issues of the
journals are each hundreds of pages long. The entire journals, or
selected articles, can be downloaded.

Using the Search and Advanced Search (Boolean) functions allows for
both simple searches and more complex searches on associated words or
phrases.

For instance, I found articles about John Fitch simply by using the
basic Search and typing in the full name, and then setting the dates
for the time frame. That works well for most subjects.

If one is looking for more specific references, then the Advanced
Search allows the use of, for example, "John Fitch" AND "Philadelphia"
AND "Delaware".

Searches will return lists of periodicals from the database that
contain the terms. The links provided by the Search engine produce
scanned images of the actual pages when clicked. The pages can then be
viewed as text by selecting from the dropdown View menu in the upper
lefthand corner of the page. Note, the text is produced by OCR and
usually contains a number of uncorrected errors.

hlabadie-ga

Thanks so much!

Thank you for the very generous tip and the rating. I am glad that you
found the previous Answer satisfactory upon a full review. The
digitized journals at Cornell are a fascinating resource for primary
research.

hlabadie-ga