The Eagle has Landed!

Yes, the long wait is over!  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper is available in its entirety (or as near as we can hope to get to its entirety) as a free, searchable database online.  Those who have used our Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online database, which offered the Eagle from 1841 to 1902, will be pleased to learn that the second half of the Eagle, 1903 to 1955, is finally open for research online.  You can search the database, browse specific dates of the paper, print or save articles, and share them through the social media outlet of your choice through our new historic newspaper portal, Brooklyn Newsstand. 

Above, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle building in downtown Brooklyn in the 1920s.  Below, the same eagle that brooded over its entrance arrives at Brooklyn Public Library fifty years later. 

Brooklyn Newsstand is a newspaper digitization initiative between the Brooklyn Collection and Newspapers.com. This partnership gives the public free access to the full run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper, which was published from 1841 to 1955.  Thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, Brooklyn Public Library was able to digitize a microfilmed copy of the Eagle from 1841 to 1902 and make those years searchable in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online database in 2003. With the second phase of digitization completed by Newspapers.com, using microfilm master negatives from the Library of Congress, the full breadth of the Eagle, and the history it documented, is now available for general research. You can learn more about the history of this influential Brooklyn newspaper here. We will continue to digitize more historic Brooklyn periodicals in the near future, so check back often to see what new resources are on offer.

Founded in 1841 by Isaac Van Anden and Henry Cruse Murphy, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published as a daily newspaper for 114 consecutive years without missing a single edition. At one point the Eagle actually became the nation's most widely read afternoon newspaper. Unusual among major metropolitan daily newspapers of that time period, the Eagle chronicled national and international affairs as well as local news and daily life in Brooklyn. As a result The Brooklyn Daily Eagle provides a window into Brooklyn's past, as well as documentation of national and international events that shaped history. The rise and fall of the Eagle coincided with economic development in Brooklyn. The paper folded in 1955 after a prolonged strike called by the New York Newspaper Guild. At the time it closed it employed 681 people and did an annual business in the sum of approximately $6 million.

Brooklyn Eagle workers striking in front of the factory on Third Avenue between Pacific and Dean Streets, 1955.

The extensive clippings and photograph files of the Brooklyn Eagle were donated to Brooklyn Public Library by its last publisher, Frank D. Schroth, in 1957.  The staff of the Brooklyn Collection has for years worked to make these materials available to the public, through digitization of newspapers and images and through one-on-one reference service.  With the launch of the Brooklyn Newsstand website, we are now able to hand the reigns over to you, the researcher.  Do know, however, that we are still here to help with in-depth research, photograph requests, and all the other question marks that pop up as you delve into Brooklyn's history.

We hope you take some time to peruse the site and try out its new features.  A quick guide to the various search and save functionalities can be found through the "About" link.  You can also create a free account with Newspapers.com to clip and save articles on the site; those who do so should take a moment to set up their account and communication settings to their liking. 

For those in the New York City area, we are also offering workshops on using and navigating the new site.  Join us on Friday, April 18th in the InfoCommons (first floor of the Central Library) from 10am to 11:30am for an introduction to Brooklyn Newsstand -- users will get an overview of the sites features and functionality and will be given laptops to try hands-on researching themselves.  A second workshop will be offered in the InfoCommons on Tuesday, May 6th from 7pm to 8:30pm.