Historical News Sources

The full run of newsreels on significant historical events from throughout the 20th century.  Includes the March of Time series, and selected videos from American History in Video and World History in Video, but adds new material from France, Japan, the Netherlands, and other countries throughout the world.

Each film has a transcript or translation. Clips and playlists can be created, saved and shared. Videos can be downloaded to an Apple OS or Android device, available for 48 hours. 

 Features more than 170 periodicals by and about African Americans, published in 26 states.  Includes popular magazines, academic and political journals, organization bulletins, and other genres.  Selection is based on James P. Dankey's African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Harvard, 1998).  Scanned from collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Can be cross-searched by keyword with African American Newspapers, Afro-Americana Imprints and other Archive of Americana series, using the Archive of Americana link below.

Access.NewspaperArchive.com is a database of mainly English-language historical newspapers starting from 1607 and going to the present.  The database consists of digital images of original newspaper pages scanned from microfilm, which have been processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to permit searching by keyword.  The quality of the scanned images, and hence the accuracy of the keyword searching, varies widely.

The largest number of holdings is from 1880-2010 and is mainly from the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland, although there are some newspapers from other countries in other languages.  More information about the holdings is at http://newspaperarchive.com/.  

Please note:  The holdings will list broad ranges of dates but NewspaperArchive.com does not necessarily contain all the issues in that time period.  For instance, it lists the holding for Chicago’s News Journal as 1923-1977, yet has no issues from 1929 to 1968.  Use the Browse tab to find more precise holdings information for specific titles.

To limit results to a particular state in America, you must first choose the United States as a country, and then the state you would like to search.

Digitized historic American newspapers published from 1836-1922 produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program. The site also provides information about American newspapers published from 1690 to the present. Find more information about the site at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/.

The Atlanta Constitution gives today’s researchers a vivid, first-hand account of one of the most turbulent periods in American history: post-Civil War reconstruction. This is an ideal primary resource for studying the feelings and reactions of Southerners on the passage of the 14th Amendment, the purging of “Rebels” from the legislature, the giving—then denying—of the right to vote to former slaves, and the passing of economic policies that changed the South and the United States forever.

This unique resource also captures the history of commercial giant Coca-Cola® in articles and display advertisements. It follows the development of baseball in America, including the Southern League’s Atlanta Crackers, sometimes called the “Yankees of the south” due to the team’s winning ways. The Atlanta Constitution also gives researchers the opportunity to read the original Uncle Remus stories that featured tricky Brer Rabbit and his foe, Brer Fox. Captured and written by Constitution journalist Joel Chandler Harris, these African folktales later inspired Walt Disney’s Song of the South and Warner Bros. cartoon character Bugs Bunny.

Digital version, with both text and image files, of The Lily, the first newspaper for women, published from 1849 to 1856. Covers many topics important to women of the era, but especially temperance, child-bearing and education, and women’s rights.

The Lily was issued from 1849 until 1853 under the editorship of Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894).

Published in Seneca Falls, New York and priced at 50 cents a year, the newspaper began as a temperance journal for “home distribution” among members of the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society, which had formed in 1848.

Bloomer felt that as women lecturers were considered unseemly, writing was the best way for women to work for reform. The paper encountered a number of early obstacles and the Society’s enthusiasm died out, but Bloomer felt a commitment to publish and assumed full responsibility for editing and publishing the paper.

Originally, the title page had the legend “Published by a committee of ladies”, but after 1850 only Bloomer’s name appeared on the masthead.

Although women’s exclusion from membership in temperance societies and other reform activities was the main force behind the initial publication of The Lily, it was not at first a radical paper, its editorial stance conforming to the emerging stereotype of women as “defenders of the home.”

In the first issue, Bloomer wrote: "It is woman that speaks through The Lily…Intemperance is the great foe to her peace and happiness. It is that above all that has made her Home desolate and beggared her offspring… Surely, she has the right to wield her pen for its Suppression. Surely, she may without throwing aside the modest refinements which so much become her sex, use her influence to lead her fellow mortals from the destroyer’s path."

The Lily always maintained its focus on temperance. Fillers often told horror stories about the effects of alcohol. For example, the May, 1849 issue noted, “A man when drunk fell into a kettle of boiling brine at Liverpool, Onondaga Co. and was scalded to death.” But gradually the newspaper began to include articles about other subjects of interest to women, many from the pen of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing under the pseudonym “sunflower.” Her earliest articles dealt with temperance, child-bearing and education, but she soon turned to the issue of women’s rights, writing about laws unfair to women and demanding change.

The circulation of The Lily rose from 500 per month to 4,000 per month because of the dress reform controversy. At the end of 1853, the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Amelia Bloomer continued to edit The Lily, which by then had a national circulation of over 6,000. Bloomer sold The Lily in 1854 to Mary Birdsall because she and her husband, Dexter were moving to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where no facilities for publishing the paper were available. She remained a contributing editor for the two years The Lily survived after she sold it. The Lily published its final issue December 15, 1856.

Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life offers rare first-person accounts and seldom-heard voices. It contains 24,838 pages of articles published by interned Japanese-Americans between 1942 and 1945.

The 25 newspapers presented here are sourced from the Library of Congress. Many of the titles in this archive are complete or substantially complete. Editions have been carefully collated and omissions are noted. Although articles in these files frequently appear in Japanese, most of the papers are in English or in dual text.

This digital collection of microfilmed Confederate Newpapers is a mixture of issues and papers from Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama ranging from 1861-1865. It contains 9,234 images sourced from the Western Reserve Historical Society.

This collection consists of:

Florida newspapers—

Floridian & Journal March 5, 1864

Cotton States April 16, 1864

The Peninsula April 21, 1864

La Recherche December 31, 1865

Tri-Weekly Observer August 4, 1866

Florida Union August 18, 1866

Georgia newspaper—

Daily Intelligencer October 7, 1858-September 18, 1859; January 4, 1860-December 31, 1860; January 1, 1861-Dec. 31, 1864

Tennessee newspapers—

The Daily Rebel August 9, 1862

Chattanooga Daily Rebel September 10, 1862-July 29, 1863

Chattanooga Daily Gazette March 5, 1864-September 2, 1865

Virginia newspapers—

Daily Express September 7, 1861-June 16, 1865

The Sentinel March 12, 1863-April 1, 1865

Alabama newspapers—

Mobile Daily Register March 11, 1860

Mobile Evening Telegraph August 19, 1864

Selma Evening Dispatch May 12, 1864

NB: This Archives Unbound collection has been digitized from the Scholarly Resources microfilm collection entitled "Confederate Newspapers." All issues in the microfilm have been included.

The Liberty Magazine Historical Archive, 1924-1950 offers researchers and students of 20th century studies digital access to one of the most popular American illustrated weekly magazines of the 1920s-1950s. Containing over 17,000 fiction and non-fiction articles and stories, the archive includes the complete 26-year run of the magazine - all scanned in full colour and fully searchable.

 

The March of Time first aired in March 1931 as a CBS radio series, in which the news of the day was dramatized using professional actors. In 1935 it was adapted for motion picture production and through its final airing in 1951 was one of the most notable newsreel and television series of the early 20th Century. A cross between confrontational journalism and docudrama, The March of Time series was provocative, amusing and sometimes outrageous. The 1938 release of "Inside Nazi Germany" was one of the most controversial films ever shown in American theaters.

The most unusual feature of the films was the re-creation or staging of events that had taken place, but had not been photographed by newsreel cameras. The producers argued that they had the same right to clarify news events with staged scenes as a re-write man on a newspaper had with words to make sense out of a reporter's notes. They used professional and amateur actors to impersonate famous people on the screen and then blended the staged scenes with newsreel footage.

The films were digitally re-mastered by HBO Archives.