Data Sources & Attribution
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Travel Guide 411 doesn't create historical content — it aggregates and helps you search across public sources, and for Pro subscribers, synthesizes what those sources say into a cited narrative. Here's exactly where everything comes from.
Chronicling America — Library of Congress
What it provides: historical American newspaper pages, mid-1700s through the mid-1900s.
License: public domain.
Shown in the app as: "Newspapers (LOC)" in search results, with a link back to the original scanned page.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
What it provides: local and regional history collections — photographs, letters, town records — aggregated from libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies across the US.
License: varies by contributing institution; DPLA surfaces the rights statement per item at the source.
Shown in the app as: "Local history (DPLA)" in search results, crediting the specific contributing institution where available, with a link back to the original.
Wikipedia
What it provides: place summaries and landmark descriptions in the Travel Guide.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. This requires attribution and requires that adaptations be shared under the same license.
Shown in the app as: every place summary and landmark card sourced from Wikipedia includes a direct attribution line ("Text from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA") with a link to the original article.
Wikivoyage
What it provides: human-written, traveler-voice destination guides — practical "what's worth seeing," "how to get around" content, distinct from Wikipedia's encyclopedic tone. Coverage is narrower than Wikipedia's; not every place has a Wikivoyage article.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, same as Wikipedia.
Shown in the app as: a "From the Wikivoyage travel guide" section on the Travel Guide's place page, with an explicit attribution line and a link to the original article.
National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)
What it provides: verified federal register status and official reference numbers for historic landmarks, via the National Park Service's public feature service.
License: public domain (US federal government data).
Shown in the app as: a green "✓ NRHP Listed" or "✓ National Historic Landmark" badge on qualifying landmarks, with the official reference number available on hover.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps — Library of Congress
What it provides: building-level historical maps of US towns, 1867–1970s, showing construction materials and building use.
License: public domain.
Shown in the app as: the "Historic Maps" section of the Travel Guide, with an explicit Library of Congress credit and a link to each original scanned sheet.
Newberry Library — Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
What it provides: historical county boundary and name-change data, used behind the scenes so a record filed under a since-renamed or reorganized county still resolves correctly.
License: public domain, free for commercial and non-commercial use.
Shown in the app as: this data isn't displayed directly — it's used internally to correctly link historical place names to their modern equivalents during search.
AI-synthesized narratives
Pro-tier story synthesis is generated using Anthropic's Claude models, working strictly from the sources listed above and cited inline. Anthropic is a technology provider for this feature, not a source of historical content itself.