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Chronicling America is a searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages through 1963 sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Follow ChronAm by subscribing to email alerts and RSS feeds.
Also, see the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries, a searchable index to newspapers published in the United States since 1690, which helps researchers identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them.
One of the deadliest tornado disasters in U.S. history, the 1908 Dixie Tornado Outbreak was a series of storms that swept through the Great Plains and Southwest. The storms killed over 200 people, many of them in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, and left thousands injured and homeless. Entire towns were destroyed as winds knocked down schools, churches, and homes of all sizes. Read more about it!
The information in this guide focuses on primary source materials found in the digitized historic newspapers from the digital collection Chronicling America.
The timeline below highlights important dates related to this topic and a section of this guide provides some suggested search strategies for further research in the collection.
| April 23, 1908 | Tornados touch down in the Great Plains and the Southwest, rolling through Nebraska, Arkansas, and Texas |
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| April 24, 1908 | Deadliest of three-day storms in Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Illinois. |
| April 25, 1908 | Final day of storms; a tornado tears through downtown Atlanta and moves south. |
