You may have noticed a number of posts in the past month discussing content that’s been recently uploaded to Chronicling America. This is because we’re at the point in our digitization cycle where all the pages we’ve so diligently duplicated and coded become usable to the public. We hope you’re as excited as we are about all the great new content available.
Today we want to call attention to the most recent batch to be uploaded, The Daytona daily news. Parts of the run of this particular paper were in our collection previously, but this newest batch contains about 8,000 pages of content. Primarily from January 1911 to February 1922, the pages of this paper cover “the Daytona Speedway attracting fans, rousing stories of moon shining, and coverage of seaside activities in the Sunshine State” (Chronicling America). Below, we highlight some of the headlines and quirky features of The Daytona daily news.
One of the more unique features of The Daytona daily news is that it was a seasonal newspaper. The paper ran only from the first of December or January thru the end of March during its run. The March 21, 1910 edition of the paper referred to it as “its summer hibernation.” For the interested reader, this means that the paper doesn’t ever cover the months June through September, and coverage for April and May as well as October through December is on a year-by-year basis. The reason for this seems largely associated with the winter car-racing season in Daytona, a topic we’ll cover more extensively in a later blog.
Like many papers of the time, The Daytona daily news featured a women’s page with fashion advice, beauty tips, advertisements, and stories for women.
The winter racing season brought in a large number of tourists, many who stayed in Daytona hotels and patronized the restaurants, stores, and theaters in the area. Because of this, the paper contains a considerable amount of advertising with that audience in mind. One local church even dubbed itself “the tourist church” on the reoccurring religious services page of the paper in 1921.
We hope you enjoy exploring The Daytona daily news!
Citations and Additional Sources
Dickens, Bethany. “Episode 27 Leather Cap & Goggles.” A History of Central Florida. podcast video, October 1, 2014. http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ahistoryofcentralfloridapodcast/27.
