Eureka! A reading of old newspapers

Abstract

Just like Archimedes we want to immerse ourselves in an immersion bath that allows us to enter the time when the old newspapers of the 19th century were written. The British historian Asa Briggs maintains that reading newspapers seems to him the best thing that can be done to “bury oneself” in a historical epoch, because “it works as an immersion exercise that allows us exactly to create a lexicon, by recovering the language technician of the time, by understanding what his key concepts are, his keywords”. This work was carried out with a grant from the Investiga Cultura Convocatoria to carry out an investigation in the patrimonial funds of the Miter Archive and Museum. The geographical and chronological cut that we proposed included the journalistic productions in the Miter Archive and Museum of the provinces of Córdoba, Mendoza and San Juan between 1820 and 1852. These limits are justified by the fact that until 1813 the current provinces of Córdoba, Mendoza, San Juan, San Luis and La Rioja formed a single jurisdiction under the name of Córdoba del Tucumán, and, although the Government of Cuyo was created in 1813, the Government of Córdoba del Tucumán continued to exist until 1820. Journalism in the region began in 1820 and had very special characteristics until the appearance of diarism in 1852.