Ad for an Esperanto typewriter, 1908

It’s a great joy to announce that, after a decade of work, our online archive finally contains nearly every issue of every newsletter ever published by a national Esperanto organization in the United States. The contents now include not only newsletters from Esperanto-USA/ELNA and its partner organizations (USEJ and JEN), but also from other organizations that preceded us (e.g., EANA).

I’d like to say thanks again to the people who willingly sacrificed their old paper copies at the scanning altar — the pages often had to be cut apart prior to scanning. Special thanks are due to Ellen Eddy, Mary Hammersmith, Bill Harris at the Central Office, and Chuck Mays at ESF. I also obtained some scans from Google’s library scanning project, and from a few unknown individuals who generously shared their private collections online.

A message from Lidia Zamenhof , 1938

The extent of the archive is now difficult to describe, and even a bit overwhelming. To give a few statistics, the archive now contains:

3.6 gigabytes of data,

of data, newsletters from 6 organizations : AEA , AEK , EANA, ELNA, JEN, kaj USEJ,

: , , EANA, ELNA, JEN, kaj USEJ, at least 11 titles , including: L’Amerika Esperantisto, The American Esperanto Journal, North American Esperanto Review, ELNA Newsletter, ELNA Update, Esperanto USA, JEN bulteno, JEN News Digest, and Ktp!

, including: L’Amerika Esperantisto, The American Esperanto Journal, North American Esperanto Review, ELNA Newsletter, ELNA Update, Esperanto USA, JEN bulteno, JEN News Digest, and Ktp! more than 113 years of issues (1906 - 2019), and

of issues (1906 - 2019), and 991 individual issues in total.

So even if you were to devour an issue each day – taking breaks only for weekends and a two-week summer vacation – you could read unique articles for almost four years straight …

JEN-bulteno, 1964

You don’t need to do that, of course, but I encourage everyone to wade through the archive and discover some of the many gems hidden there. With so much material it’s hard to choose a starting point, but here are a few possibilities:

1906-1908: Birth of two parallel Esperanto organizations ( AEK kaj AEA ), merger to form EANA

kaj ), merger to form EANA 1910 (October): a report on the World Congress held in Washington, DC, and the visit of Ludwig Zamenhof

1937 (November): a report on Lidia Zamenhof’s travels through the USA teaching Esperanto

1950-1957 a dispute between EANA and UEA, withdrawal of EANA from UEA, schism in the US Esperanto movement, decline and fall of EANA

1953: birth of ELNA

1962: JEN-bulteno appears for young people, published until 1972 and sporadically in 1976, 1985, and 1986

1993: appearance of USEJ’s Ktp!, which lasted until 1996, appearing again in 1999

If you’d like to explore the archive, please consider helping us find the most interesting articles to feature as separate web pages — as we’ve done in this issue, for example, in the column el la arĥivo. See the help pages for proofreaders in the online colophon.