`search_newspapers`

Pack: chronicling-america · Connect: https://pipeworx.io/mcp (see Connect below for a single-pack URL)

No MCP client? Call it directly: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_newspapers for the schema, then POST the same URL with its arguments for the data.

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, place, or topic in history — returns the total match count, then for each page the newspaper, publication date, city/state and a link to the digitized page (plus an OCR text excerpt of the matching page for covered states such as Montana). Filter by date range and U.S. state; every response carries data_as_of. Example: search_newspapers({ query: “influenza epidemic”, date_from: “1918”, date_to: “1919”, state: “oklahoma” }).

Parameters

Name	Type	Required	Description
`query`	string	yes	Full-text search terms (matched against the OCR’d newspaper text).
`date_from`	string	no	Earliest year or date (e.g. “1918” or “1918-01-01”). Defaults to the collection start.
`date_to`	string	no	Latest year or date (e.g. “1919”). Defaults to present.
`state`	string	no	U.S. state to restrict to: name or postal code (e.g. “california”, “new york”, “MT”).
`limit`	number	no	Number of results (default 10, max 25).

Example call

Arguments

{
  "query": "flood",
  "state": "montana",
  "date_from": "1922",
  "date_to": "1922"
}

curl

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/chronicling-america/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"search_newspapers","arguments":{"query":"flood","state":"montana","date_from":"1922","date_to":"1922"}}}'

TypeScript (@pipeworx/sdk)

import { Pipeworx } from '@pipeworx/sdk';
const pipeworx = new Pipeworx();

const result = await pipeworx.call('search_newspapers', {
  "query": "flood",
  "state": "montana",
  "date_from": "1922",
  "date_to": "1922"
});

More examples

{
  "query": "influenza epidemic",
  "date_from": "1918",
  "date_to": "1919",
  "state": "oklahoma"
}

{
  "query": "gold rush",
  "date_from": "1849",
  "date_to": "1855",
  "state": "california",
  "limit": 20
}

Connect

Add this to your MCP client config — every tool in the catalog, including this one — or use one-click install buttons:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Connect to just the chronicling-america pack

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "chronicling-america": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/chronicling-america/mcp"
    }
  }
}

See Getting Started for client-specific install steps.

search_newspapers