XooxleAnswers

Searching History...For Free!

Newspaper archives with their collections of millions of old newspaper articles have always been a treasure trove for historical research, but in pre-digital days, a treasure that one approached with grim determination. Hours going through dusty old stacks, or scrolling through dizzying rolls of microfilm (inevitably, in negative image format), usually turned up...not very much.

How the world has changed! A century of old newspaper articles can now be searched with ease.  In seconds, you can pull up articles on your great grandfather, and wanted notices for Jesse James, advertisments for a Ford Model T, or headlines on the sinking of the Titanic.

Pretty cool!  That is, if you can get access to the right archives! And as it just so happens, the New York Times has recently made the bulk of its archives available for free!  This is great news, as the Times is one of the great historical resources available (users may still have to register at the NYT website before using the archives).  The archives of the Times can be searched directly here.

Historical researchers quickly become familiar with other massive newspaper archives like Proquest, Readex, Newsbank, and the like, but these are high-priced, institutional subscription services, and not everyone can get ready access to them.

A much more accessible and affordable subscription service for old news articles is NewspaperArchive.com.  I use them constantly for family ancestry and historical research.

Increasingly, though, there are digital archives of old newpapers available to everyone at no charge (by "old", let's say, anything that goes back fifty years or more). Many of them are squirreled away in odd corners of the internet, but they're well-worth knowing about.

I've arranged my collection of newspaper archive links into several categories:  state and regional newspaper archives, college and student newspapers, historical magazine archives, international archives, including numerous foreign language sources, and a few other key resources worth knowing about.

To see the best free newspaper archive I've come across so far, offering centuries of history, head to the next page...

 Enjoy exploring history?  Take a look at FirstMention.com 

See XooxleAnswers' write-up on newspaper archives at eHow.com