Public Sentiment Towards Firearms in the 19th Century

Faculty Sponsor: Pavel Oleinikov

Alex Cavallaro

Alex is a rising senior (class of 2025) studying Mathematics and Data Analysis. He is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who graduated from Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In his free time, he enjoys writing fiction.

Abstract: The focus of this research is to examine and understand the general social focus surrounding firearms and firearm legislation in the United States during the 19th century. From the Library of Congress, digitized copies of over 4,000 newspapers spanning various timeframes within the 19th and early 20th centuries were obtained. The primary goal of this research is to take use natural language processing to identify the subjects of the pages and classify them into several subject categories based on their relationship to firearms. This information can then be used to examine potential trends over time of various newspapers.

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