The POLITICAL ARENA newspaper first appeared in Fredericksburg, Virginia on July 4, 1827. It was established by John Minor IV who published it until September 12, 1828 when William M. Blackford assumed proprietorship.
In 1989 the POLITICAL ARENA holdings of the Virginia Historical Society of Richmond were microfilmed by University Microfilm International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 through financial arrangements with the Central Rappahannock Regiona l Library (CRRL), 1201 Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, Virginia. This action resulted in the production of five reels of film, copies of which are now in the Virginiana Collection of the CRRL.
The microfilm reels include, the first reel, 4 Jul 1827-29 Dec 1829; the second, 1 Jan 1830-28 Dec 1832; the third, 1 Jan 1833-29 Dec 1835; and the fourth 1 Jan 1836-28 Dec 1838; were indexed as separate units.
The index was prepared by Robert Hodge. The twice-weekly (Tuesday and Friday), four-page, six-column issues were scanned for items deemed of value to the LOCAL historian and genealogist. Each entry consists of essentially four parts: Name, Reason for being, Publication date, and Page/Column numbers. The electronic version was created by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College by scanning a copy of the text and then modifying the format to fit a table.
If you prefer, or if you have difficulty accessing this database you can right-click the download button and bring the data to your machine as a tab-delimited text file and open the file in your spread sheet program. Be certain to set your fields to text before you open this file in Microsoft Excel or it will assume all dates are twentieth century. download