WRH 200 (Dougherty)

Challenges for finding historical news articles

• Even when historical newspapers have been digitized, they may have sort runs (covering only a few months or years) or have some issues missing.  Even though most or all of incidents your class is looking at would have had news coverage at the time, the articles in question may not have survived or been digitized.  I looked for articles on three different incidents and was able to find some on only one of them.
• Identifying search terms is also a challenge.  See the the 3-minute video below where I give an example of how I selected possible search terms for my example.
• The search interfaces for the digital collections can be a challenge.  I've provided a video below that illustrates searching in one of the biggest collections available-- Chronicling America from the Library of Congress.

Identifying search terms

Free-to-share newspaper collections

Below are some collections that you can search to find articles related to historical events.  Because these are all freely accessible, you may link to or upload downloaded documents to the class project.

State collections

Some states have worked only with Library of Congress' Chonicling America, but others have created their own repositories of digitized newspaers.

Note:  The search interfaces for these may vary a lot.

Other collections with free-to-share materials

These are a couple of examples of very large digital repositories.  Many different institutions have contributed to them and they have a wide range of content types. Searching in here will be even more hit or miss than searching in the newspaper collections, but occasionally you might find something really interesting!  I've included a few examples of things I found.

Digital Public Library of America

Internet Archive