Mr. Morris suspected that one place to look for countervailing evidence was the arrival notices that 19th-century newspapers would print whenever someone significant checked into a local hotel — a forerunner to the tweet, enabling friends to know someone was in town and where to find them. If Pulitzer visited New York City to check out takeover targets prior to 1883, he might surface in these mundane social announcements. The problem was, The New York Times and other papers didn’t index such quotidian matters. So scanning tens of thousands of announcements for a single name wasn’t feasible.
As luck would have it, Mr. Morris was wrestling with this question just as several ambitious efforts got under way to digitize thousands of historical newspapers. These new databases enable researchers to perform keyword searches in some of the thousands of newspapers printed in the United States since the colonial era; what would have taken lifetimes of relentless reading could suddenly be completed in seconds.
Mr. Morris searched for Pulitzer and immediately turned up evidence that he had been staying in New York City hotels a year before his famous acquisition, scouting out possible deals; the persistent myth of Pulitzer’s precipitate purchase had been demolished.
“That’s when I realized that these databases would change the work we do,” Mr. Morris said.
For generations, biographers have used the same methods to conduct research: they waded through the paper trail left by their subject, piecing together a life from epistolary fragments. Based on what they found, they might troll through newspapers from specific dates in the hope of finding coverage of their subject. There were no new-fangled technologies that promised to transform their research, no way of harnessing machines to reveal new layers of historical truth.
That’s all starting to change. Several campaigns to digitize newspapers — Readex’s “American Historical Newspapers” available by subscription at research universities, or the free “Chronicling America” collection available at the Library of Congress — have the potential to revolutionize biographical research. Newspapers are often described as the “first draft of history,” and thanks to these new tools, biographers can tap them in ways that an earlier generation of scholars could only have dreamed of.
Mr. Morris isn’t alone. Other biographers have found that digital newspapers not only shed new light on well-known lives, but they can also help circumvent the archival gate-keeping that is common with famous figures.
When these famous people (or their children) gather their papers, they usually leave out or even destroy anything embarrassing or incriminating. But the staggering volume of printed material contained in historical newspapers means that evidence of illicit trysts, business deals gone bad and scandals forgotten will likely surface somewhere, somehow. It may not have made the national papers, but if some peccadillo was mentioned in a small-town paper in Arizona in 1872, it can now be rediscovered with minimal effort.
It’s also possible for biographers to find writings that previous biographers have missed. Joshua Kendall, who recently completed a biography of Noah Webster, used the Readex database to dig up numerous articles by Webster that weren’t part of the carefully curated collection bequeathed by his descendants. He ran searches on some of Webster’s newspaper pseudonyms — it was common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for public figures to sign articles with a pen name; Webster liked to use “Rusticus.” Mr. Kendall hit further pay dirt when he noticed that Webster was fond of certain turns of phrase: entering those into databases yielded more writings probably penned by him.



