Update! Recently this story was featured on Continuum in their Winter 2018 issue.

The first 100 years of UU’s student newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, has been digitized and placed online. You’ll find every page of every issue, from 1892 through 1992, at the web site Utah Digital Newspapers. Here’s a quick look back at the origins of the Chrony.

It’s fitting that Marriott Library’s Digital Services Department is responsible for the digitization, because the Chronicle’s very first staff, in 1892, was recruited and supervised by University Librarian George Q. Coray.

The Chrony is one of more than 800 university-student newspapers in the U.S.—and one of the few to remain continually in print for over a century.  The inaugural issue, published on Friday, December 16, 1892, includes an astonishing notice:

A year of college for five bucks? Sounds pretty good! While the economics of higher education have obviously changed, one of the pleasures of exploring historical newspapers is finding out how similar those “old-fashioned” students were to their present-day counterparts. To open their premier issue, the editors wrote:

“We are living in a period of intense intellectual activity. Long established creeds are being subjected to the most rigid examination, and old beliefs are on every hand fearlessly attacked—nothing is taken on trust, however plausible it may seem.”

Initially, the Chrony appeared weekly and somewhat irregularly, and it resembled a literary magazine more than a newspaper. Its pages were stitched inside decorative front and back covers.

One of the key advantages of digitization is searchability: researchers can enter a term and uncover every page on which a particular topic or name appears. A century of the Utah Daily Chronicle in digital form is a gold mine of information waiting to be discovered.