Y’all are working my pleasant attitude and so I do to you what I do to humans when I need to pretend that you aren’t here.

I read *poof* (…now you’re gone…mentally but keep reading anyway)

I tune folks out like Grandma Hill would as a million crazy things went on around her involving several toddlers and a German Shepard.

I would stand at her knee and watch as she dramatically flipped each huge page over to continue following along with the long rows of shapes and columns consisting of news.

Newspapers contained information, I figured that out relatively early in life, Grandma would mention a piece of news over her shoulder, towards my mother, if she thought it worthy to share.

I wanted to know ‘news’, and after pestering my Grandmother enough, she began teaching me to read, using our local town newspaper, at the age of three.

Reading newspapers became, and still are, a favorite hobby of mine. Though now I prefer to flip through the local newspaper while out on vacation. You can learn so much by reading what the writers and editors find to be  useful information for their consumers. Sometimes the language is different, dialect and sentence structure slightly different then from where I’m used to…?

Better grammar? Worse grammar? Am I imagining things? Who cares….. I’m a geek.

Microfiche, if you know how to look, and what to look for, can take you back in time. The first time I successfully located and pulled up a newspaper on film, my eyes bulged and darted at the image as if I was looking at a kaleidoscopic.

But since folks are kind these days, you don’t have to travel to the local archive library to feast your eyes on the Freedom’s Journal.

What is the Freedom’s Journal you ask?

Well, its the nations first African American owned and operated newspaper. Duh!?

The entire archive of every issue is available online here.

Published from 1827-1829, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library has digitized each publication into PDF for you to view for free.

Peep this:

there are five hundred thousand freed persons of color, one half of whom might peruse and the whole benefit  from the journal….no publication of yet, has been dedicated exclusively to their improvement

I’m so not as organized and fabulous as Swirl Girl, but I thought the Blerds would enjoy this, because it made me quite happy.

Until next time….