Chronicling America MCP Server

@pipeworx/chronicling-america

Full-text search of digitized historical U.S. newspapers from the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection — the newspaper, date, place, page link and an excerpt of the page's OCR text for any person, event or topic.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1863+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• search_newspapers({ query, state?, date_from?, date_to?, limit? }) — pages whose OCR text matches query, ranked by relevance, total_matches first. Filter by U.S. state (name or postal code) and by year or exact date. Every response carries data_as_of and served_from:
  • pipeworx_search — states in Pipeworx search coverage, and national (no-state) questions once the whole collection is covered. Each answer carries an excerpt of every matching page and a coverage block (years, pages searched, batches). Coverage grows state by state: a state answers here once every Library of Congress batch carrying its papers is in. Montana is covered today; the rest of the collection is being added. National answers are bounded at about seven seconds; if some partitions have not answered by then, coverage.partial says how many did.
  • loc_search — everything else goes to the Library of Congress search, retried a few times because it answers only a fraction of requests. A failure there is reported as upstream_down, never as "no matches".

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• Library of Congress, Chronicling America (National Digital Newspaper Program) — page OCR text and newspaper title records. US public domain.

Notes for the next person:

• The Library of Congress keyword search is the unreliable part: on 2026-10-18 a fresh keyword query timed out from every network we tried, about 9 times in 10.
• Results from pipeworx_search link to the same loc.gov page viewer (page_url) as the LoC search does; excerpt is the page's raw OCR, which is noisy for 19th- and early-20th-century type.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/chronicling-america/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

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

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1863+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_newspapers \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"flood","state":"montana","date_from":"1922","date_to":"1922"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_newspapers. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-chronicling-america is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/chronicling-america/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "chronicling-america": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-chronicling-america"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Chronicling America data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT