Alumnae Kristi Palmer was recently interviewed by WFYI, Indy’s public media station.
From the online article, which you can read in full here:
Three IUPUI digital researchers have traced the first use of the term “hoosier” in a newspaper, back to 1833, and received a $2,000 cash prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities for doing so.
Kristi Palmer says she and colleagues Caitlyn Pollock and Ted Polley used the Chronicling America Database of digitized United States newspapers to track the term.
“From the get go it’s already connected to Indiana. Not always but you do see evidence as early as 1833 that its describing people from Indiana. And it often appears in this list of nick names,” Palmer says. “If you were from Illinois you were a sucker — that one didn’t stick. But, if you were from Ohio you were a buckeye, or from Wisconsin a badger.”
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