Lajos Kossuth and the Transnational News

Abstract

The scale of newspaper digitization and emergence of computational research methods has opened new opportunities for scholarship on the history of the press–as well as a new set of problems. Those problems compound for research that spans national as well as linguistic contexts. This article offers a novel methodological approach for confronting these challenges by synthesizing computational with conventional methods and working across a collaborative multilingual team. We present a case study studying the transnational and multilingual news event of Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth’s journey to the United States in 1851–52. Our approach helps to demonstrate some of the characteristic patterns and complexities in transatlantic news circulation, including the pathways, reach, temporality, vagaries, and silences of this system. These patterns, in turn, offer some insights into how we understand the significance of this era for histories of the press.