“Surfing the Web” is one of those 1990s-era phrases that seems to have faded from our everyday vocabulary, even if the activity remains one of our favorite ways to kill time. This month Old Gold is pleased to pass along another way to spend those odd moments when you have nothing better to do: visit the Iowa Digital Library’s new Daily Iowan Historic Newspapers Collection. Indeed, this is a great new research tool for serious scholars and casual users alike. You’ll find it at dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu.

A little background before we plunge into the Web site. The Daily Iowan originated in 1868 as the University Reporter, a monthly chronicle of campus events and dispatches from other institutions. The masthead in its inaugural edition included the expression, “Success Crowns Effort,” and the premiere issue included a brief report of the university’s first dozen years as a functioning campus, signed by “H.M.R.” Perhaps the author was Howard Marshall Remley of Oxford, Iowa, a first-year student whose name appears on the list of matriculants in the UI’s 1868 general catalog.

In 1879 a second campus newspaper, the Vidette, began to circulate and, two years later, the two merged and published as, appropriately, the Vidette-Reporter. In September 1901, the V-R launched a daily edition (excepting holidays, summer months, and — for a stretch — Mondays) as the Daily Iowan.

So give it a try. When you go to the site, choose a date — your birthday, for example — from the drop-down menu and see what comes up. For Old Gold, one of the front-page stories of that day in 1956 was a protest at Florida A&M University in support of two African-American women students who refused to move to the rear of a city bus. Pick Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the closest issue to that date you’ll find is Dec. 9, 1941 — two days after the Sunday attack. (The DI did not publish on Mondays at the time.)

A couple of housekeeping items to note: A text-search feature will be added to the site later in 2012; currently the site is searchable only by date. Also, there are two gaps in our coverage of the collection: September–December 1918, and June–August 1984. Otherwise, the collection is complete, up through this past September.

The Daily Iowan collection — perhaps a half-million pages covering over 140 years — is an indispensible research tool for alumni, current students, historians, and genealogists. It’s also for the rest of us who might have a few minutes to spare.

—David McCartney, University Archivist

Sept. 12, 2001.

Oct. 25, 1929, the day after the historic stock market crash. Though the story made the front page, the DI led with the upcoming football game against Wisconsin.

Nov. 3, 1948. Dewey did not defeat Truman, and the DI correctly called it a close race.

Dec. 6, 1967. Anti-war protests in front of the IMU led to arrests.