The Mills Archive Trust in Reading, England has recently begun digitising their collection of rare, out-of-print Northwestern Miller milling and grain industry trade magazines. The magazine was a weekly in the US from the 1870s-1970s, and functioned as the premier milling and grain industry magazine in the US, Canada, and to some degree, abroad. This digitisation project has been grant-funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities and conducted by Starlina Rose, a PhD Student from the University of Sheffield.

We have digitised the magazines belonging to the decade of the 1930s as this fills a gap in the offerings currently available digitally through the Internet Archive and the New York City Public Library. The weekly Northwestern Miller magazines present an in-depth look at the effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, other domestic and foreign policies on the grain trade, grain diplomacy in the build-up to WWII, commentary on race, poverty, sociopolitics regarding women in the workforce, as well as popular culture, diet fads, and more.

Our aim in beginning the digitisation journey of our Northwestern Miller collection in the 1930s is to make accessible and researchable an incredibly relevant, useful and interesting section of the magazine’s history to historians and researchers who have been either previously unaware of the magazine, or unable to access it in the decade of the 1930s. What we have digitised so far is available online here: https://catalogue.millsarchive.org/the-northwestern-miller