@pipeworx/chronicling-america

Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp — every tool in the catalog, including @pipeworx/chronicling-america’s. Install: one-click buttons

No MCP client? Skip the connection: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs {"query":"..."} to find a tool below, GET /v1/tools/<name> for its schema, POST the same URL with arguments for the data — see For AI agents.

Tools: 1

Full-text search of digitized historical U.S. newspapers from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America collection — the newspaper, date, place, page link and an excerpt of the page’s OCR text for any person, event or topic.

Tools

• search_newspapers({ query, state?, date_from?, date_to?, limit? }) — pages whose OCR text matches query, ranked by relevance, total_matches first. Filter by U.S. state (name or postal code) and by year or exact date. Every response carries data_as_of and served_from:
  • pipeworx_search — states in Pipeworx search coverage, and national (no-state) questions once the whole collection is covered. Each answer carries an excerpt of every matching page and a coverage block (years, pages searched, batches). Coverage grows state by state: a state answers here once every Library of Congress batch carrying its papers is in. Montana is covered today; the rest of the collection is being added. National answers are bounded at about seven seconds; if some partitions have not answered by then, coverage.partial says how many did.
  • loc_search — everything else goes to the Library of Congress search, retried a few times because it answers only a fraction of requests. A failure there is reported as upstream_down, never as “no matches”.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• Library of Congress, Chronicling America (National Digital Newspaper Program) — page OCR text and newspaper title records. US public domain.

Notes for the next person:

• The Library of Congress keyword search is the unreliable part: on 2026-10-18 a fresh keyword query timed out from every network we tried, about 9 times in 10.
• Results from pipeworx_search link to the same loc.gov page viewer (page_url) as the LoC search does; excerpt is the page’s raw OCR, which is noisy for 19th- and early-20th-century type.

Tools

• search_newspapers — Full-text search of digitized historical U.S. newspapers (~1690s–present) from the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” collection. Find primary-source newspaper coverage of any person, event, pl