Newspaper accounts of key moments in Athens and University of Georgia history are available freely online as part of the Georgia Historic Newspapers database, thanks to a Digital Library of Georgia effort to digitize issues of the Athens Banner-Herald from 1928 to 1965.
Funded by the University of Georgia Libraries and the statewide GALILEO initiative, the project provides online access to local reporting of the first football game played at Sanford Stadium in 1929 and the tumultuous desegregation of the university in 1961. The collection also includes milestones in Athens’ history, such as the establishment of the city’s Navy Supply Corps School in 1954, and the opening of the Beechwood Shopping Center in 1963.
Athens newspapers dating from 1827 to 1928 were among the Digital Library of Georgia’s first newspaper digitization efforts nearly two decades ago. Since then, the DLG has preserved online more than 3 million newspaper pages from more than 200 Georgia cities.
“Our interest in digitizing more Athens newspapers never waned during that time and we are excited to continue that work this year to make the 20th century history of the Classic City more accessible for researchers,” said Nicole Lawrence, director of discovery and digital services at UGA Libraries and the interim head of the Digital Library of Georgia.
The latest digitization round of the Athens Banner-Herald includes an additional 125,000 pages that can be browsed by date or searched by keyword on the Georgia Historic Newspapers website at gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu. Work will continue to digitize content from 1965 to 1977 over the next year.
“It is so exciting to have digital access to the Athens Banner-Herald,” said Jane McPherson, an associate professor in UGA’s School of Social Work, who advocated for the continued digitization because she incorporates the resource into her classes. “My students use the newspaper to see how broad national trends in social welfare played out on the local stage: How were widows and orphans cared for after the Civil War? Where were the local settlement houses? How did local people feel about child labor? And how did Athens prevent and then promote the racial desegregation of schools? … It’s stunning to read real-time local responses to historical events—from the Civil War to the New Deal to the War on Poverty.”
The Georgia Newspaper Project began at the University of Georgia Libraries in the 1950s, as an effort to provide microfilm access to newspapers at local libraries across the state. The Georgia Historic Newspapers online database was launched in 2007, and as of September 2024, the site offers free access to 436,849 issues of 1,080 newspapers, spanning Georgia history from 1763 to 2024. Visitors can browse titles by county, title, or date, or perform advanced keyword searches.