Terms of Service

By using askthepast.us you agree to the terms below. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the site.

1. What Ask the Past is

Ask the Past is an AI-assisted search interface over public-domain historical newspapers (primarily the U.S. Library of Congress “Chronicling America” collection). We don’t own the underlying scans; we link to them and surface them with AI-generated headlines, summaries, and curated context.

2. Accuracy & intended use

• AI-generated headlines and summaries may contain errors. Don’t rely on them as authoritative history. Always click through to the original Library of Congress scan to verify.
• OCR text from 19th-century print can be wrong. Treat snippets as a guide, not a transcript.
• Historic newspapers contain language and viewpoints that are racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive by modern standards. We show them as primary sources for research — we don’t endorse them.

3. Acceptable use

• Don’t scrape the API at volumes that would overload us or our upstream sources.
• Don’t use the site to harass, defame, or impersonate anyone.
• Don’t attempt to break, reverse-engineer, or work around the admin authentication.

4. Intellectual property

• The newspaper scans, OCR text, and metadata are public-domain courtesy of the Library of Congress.
• The Ask the Past name, logo, UI design, AI-generated headlines, and editorial selection are © Ask the Past. Personal, non-commercial sharing is encouraged — commercial republishing requires written permission.

5. Third-party links

Outbound links to Newspapers.com (and similar) are affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you subscribe. See affiliate disclosure.

6. Warranty & liability

The site is provided “as is”, with no warranties of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Ask the Past is not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages from your use of the site.

7. Changes

We may update these terms occasionally. Material changes will be noted on this page with a new “last updated” date.

8. Contact

Questions? [email protected]