ABSTRACT
During the past twenty years, newspapers have become an increasingly important resource for the research that I and others have devoted to rethinking and sometimes rewriting American silent cinema. Initially, our research had to rely on microfilm collections in disparate public libraries and state historical society libraries. As anyone who has used microfilm knows, the reproduction is very uneven in quality, sometimes almost illegible, and lacking all trace of those pages once printed in color. Despite those caveats, microfilm has allowed access to newspapers whose original copies have long disappeared.
