Wyoming Newspapers has added its first foreign-language titles to the online collection with two historic newspapers from Rock Springs: Grido Del Popolo (The Cry of the People) and Vita Nuova (New Life). Available issues date between 1907 and 1909 and are freely available to anyone with an internet connection at newspapers.wyo.gov/.
Rock Springs is known as the “Home of 56 Nationalities,” because of the influx of immigrants from all over the world who came to work in the coal mines that supplied the Union Pacific Railroad.
“These two papers reflect the diversity of the Rock Springs community and of Wyoming,” said Thomas Ivie, research and statistics librarian at the Wyoming State Library. “We’re grateful to the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center Archives for loaning these to us and allowing us to digitize these rare Wyoming newspapers.”
Wyoming Newspapers is a service of the Wyoming State Library that makes historic Wyoming newspapers available online. Historians, genealogists, students and other scholars rely on them to provide a first-hand and sometimes the only account of local news of the time.
“We hope our visitors have fun making their own discoveries in this great historical newspaper collection that will continue to grow over time,” Ivie said.
For those who’d like to explore these newspapers, but don’t speak Italian, text can be copied and pasted into any online translator for an approximation in English.
Wyoming Newspapers includes over 330 historic Wyoming newspaper titles, the earliest of which is the Chugg Water Journal from 1849. Around 800,000 newspaper pages have been converted from microfilm and paper to a digital format. Anyone with an interest in history, whether local, territorial, state of Wyoming, regional, national, and international, can search by keyword or browse by specified towns or counties, on certain dates, or by a specific title from any computer, tablet, or smart phone. The text is searchable, including news articles, news briefs, obituaries, and other items of interest.