Century Late sends the news from exactly 100 years ago, the morning it happened, as the original newspaper clippings: old newspapers, read one day at a time.
How each edition is made
- Every newspaper page digitized for that date is pulled from the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection. Newspapers from a century ago are in the public domain.
- Pages are compared across papers to find the stories that ran in many of them: the wire news of the day.
- Each paper's version is cut out of the scan, using article layouts from Harvard's American Stories project where they exist.
- An AI editor looks at the clippings, rejects wrong matches and unreadable scans, picks the clearest version of each story, and orders the edition.
AI chooses what to show, never what it says. Every word in a clipping was set in type a hundred years ago. The short context notes are ours, and never mention anything that hadn't happened yet.
These are period newspapers: they carry the language and prejudices of their time.