What's History: Little Local Sources on Big Cold Days

This is it, the Big Cold Day. We've been talking about it for a week. As predicted, Midwestern temperatures lost so many degrees it seems like sheer irresponsibility; the wind chill has it feeling like -40 F outside in Champaign today (not, of course, that I have felt it for myself, as I'm afraid to let in the cold air and never get warm again). Everyone here is hoping their furnaces keep kicking for the duration and fervently instructing one another to "stay warm." 

In honor of the occasion and because I definitely don't have anything else to do (ha), I thought it might be interesting to do a little investigation into the history of notably cold weather in these parts, using a nifty little database called the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. I wanted to see the papers in the immediate vicinity, to link as closely as possible the weather of today to other past Big Cold Days , and see if there was anything useful for a class assignment that might come out of this sort of investigation. The great thing about this collection is that, unlike many library resources I use to do research, it's free to use for anyone without any sort of login, so follow along if you'd like! 

As I settled in I ran into an interesting little research problem. There were four collections involved in this project: the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, which has the local papers I was hoping to examine; Farm, Field, and Fireside, which holds agricultural papers from around the country; American Popular Entertainment, full of entertainment industry trade journals; and Collegiate Chronicle, students newspapers from a wide variety of postsecondary institutions. I'm sure these last three all have something to say about weather, but I wanted to know only about the closest regions' papers, so I needed to look only at the first collection. I could browse through titles in each of these collections, but the search didn't seem to let me narrow to a collection-- I could choose to confine the search to one or more paper titles (though only more than one if they were next to each other in the alphabetical list), so I just compared the list from here to the list of options here and searched within a few that looked promising. 

I decided the word "coldest" was the most likely candidate to look for in the papers I examined-- The Champaign Daily News, the Daily Illini, and the Urbana Daily Courier. Below are a few favorites-- all titles link to the originals, with PDFs available of the full issues. 

Amongst two pages of reporting on a tragic 1903 theatre fire in Chicago, this brief article adds a bit of levity. D.C. Long, a local Civil War Veteran who appears a few other times in the Urbana paper, claims that exactly forty years ago was the coldest in the history of the nation, with animals killed by the chill. "I don't know what the thermometer registered, but it was cold, I know that," he concluded. 

"Cold Forty Years Ago Today," Urbana Daily Courier, Jan. 1, 1904.

These stories appeared a page apart in a 1929 issue of the Daily Illini. I like the focus in each on the role of the "weather man"-- the AP reporter accords him a lot of power! 

"Brrr! Thermometer Dropped to 8 Below Yesterday Morning" and
"Weather Man Has Touch of Kindness," Daily Illini, Dec. 4, 1929. 

This 1959 report of an unusually cold November features a student giving a far better demonstration of proper scarf usage than her modern counterpart distributed by the University of Illinois yesterday. 

"Winter Hits Area Before It's Due," Daily Illini, Nov. 18, 1959. 

It was a lot of fun sorting through these sources. I'll likely find a way to incorporate a similar activity into a history course, especially one on media or an intro to historical methods. The benefit is similar to unstructured research time, with more of a defined, if small, endgoal-- to figure out some connection to a modern event in the past. It's a nice practice run before students jump into trying to find sources for a large research project, with lots of directions to run in and few ways to really fail. It could also lead into a discussion of shifts and continuities in how the topic is discussed in the press-- how have we been informed about the current weather as compared to those informed of cold weather in the past, for example? How do the headlines present the story? 


Related Links: 
Some comparisons of recent stories on the Big Cold Day: Daily Illini, News-Gazette. And, if you're hungry, the modern Urbana Daily Courier. 

Some historical Illinois Weather Trivia for January. 

If you'd like to see more old newspapers freely available, check out Chronicling America at the Library of Congress, which features more varieties of newspaper than you can shake a stick at.