Research Guides: Historical Newspapers: Welcome

Welcome to the Historical Newspapers Online LibGuide

This research guide:

Gathers historical U. S. newspapers that are available online, including those available through newspaperarchives.com, the Google News Historical Archives, Chronicling America (Library of Congress), and state archives.

Historical newspapers:

are excellent primary sources for research, and
have value to many different disciplines, as a starting point for research or as a supplement to research already underway.

If you have additional questions about using these online resources, please contact a librarian for assistance.

Historical Newspapers for Research - Broad Resources

Chronicling America (national level)

Chronicling America is a collection of over 600 newspapers from 30 states published between the 1830s and 1922, and it continues to grow rapidly. Backed by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, these newspapers are all freely available. Although each state on the Historical Newspapers by State page indicates if Chronicling America includes newspapers from it, this site also allows you to search all Chronicling America newspapers simultaneously.

**Includes the Maryville Republican (an African-American newspaper; 1867-1877); the Clarksville Chronicle (Oct. 30, 1857 - Sept. 08, 1865;
Jan. 03, 1868 - Dec. 21, 1872) and the Clarksville Weekly Chronicle (July 06, 1855 - July 06, 1855; Sept. 15, 1865 - July 12, 1867).**

Google Newspapers (national level)

Google once indicated an interest in digitizing all the world's written information. Having digitized a significant number of newspapers, Google gave up. The old historical newspaper archive search interface is defunct and was replaced by this one. An alphabetical listing of the historical newspapers in Google Archives is available here.

NewspaperCat (U.S. and Caribbean)

A University of Florida project called NewspaperCat seems to have ingested all the U.S. and Caribbean newspapers and made them searchable by title, language and place of publication.

Other Resources of Interest

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
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Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Civil Rights Mississippi Database
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Mississippi was a focal point in the struggle for civil rights in America, and Hattiesburg, home of The University of Southern Mississippi, had the largest and most successful Freedom Summer project in 1964. The civil rights materials collected at the University document a local history with truly national significance.

The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.
Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project
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Offers 58 titles from the state of Louisiana published between 1860 through 1922—a total of 100,000 pages. An additional 100,000 pages from 20 titles published between 1836-1922 are currently being processed for digitization and will be available by the end of 2013. Access the complete list of newspaper titles via the Title or Parish links on the left. Browse newspapers from Louisiana and other states at Chronicling America.
Directory of Digitized Newspapers
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A listing of additional digitized newspaper collections from cultural institutions around the United States. For quicker browsing, just select a state from the table.
Historical African American Newspapers Online (Marist College)
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This guide provides a list of historical African American Newspapers available online as part of digitization projects at libraries and historical societies as well as digitization projects done by Google. The content is available for free, though it is at the discretion of the institution providing the content. The newspapers contained within guide are those that have ceased to operate or are currently running papers with archives available. It does not include papers that are currently running and only offer access to the most recent articles.

There are also a number of links marked with MARIST USERS ONLY. These are papers available to Marist students, staff and faculty only through our subscriptions to databases.
Historical New York Times (1851-2009)
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Search the complete text of the New York Times (1851-2009) with Index (1851-1993) for PDF images of original articles which include photographs and drawings.
Historical Newspapers Online (UPenn Libraries)
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Features newspapers by state and national newspapers in two easy-to-use pages; full newspaper descriptions included for each title mentioned, with additional links to content in Chronicling America. Created and maintained by the Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA.
NewspaperCat *(University of Florida Digital Collections)
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The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) is a tool that facilitates the discovery of online digitized historical newspaper content from newspapers published in the United States and the Caribbean. NewspaperCat was funded by a grant from the George A. Smathers Libraries.

Search by keyword, newspaper title or by city, county or state to locate titles. From your search result, click on the link(s) to connect to the digital newspaper(s). In many cases, this content is keyword searchable, depending on the hosting organization.

NewspaperCat currently links to over 1,500 full-text newspaper titles with a goal to include links to as many US and Caribbean newspapers with archival digital content as possible. Plans are to expand the Catalog as newly digitized newspaper titles are located.
Tennessee Newspaper Project
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The Tennessee Newspaper Project (TNP) is part of the United States Newspaper Program, a national effort to locate, catalog, preserve on microfilm, and make accessible, newspapers published in the United States from the earliest colonial days to the present. Tennessee's project is based in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee Libraries.

The project does not have any newspapers. It maintains a database of information of American newspaper holdings in the state of Tennessee and has access to information on the holdings in libraries across the country. Some papers can be borrowed through interlibrary loan; contact your local interlibrary loan department or the holdings institution listed in the database here for more information on accessing a newspaper.
United States Newspaper Program
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The United States Newspaper Program is a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Technical assistance is furnished by the Library of Congress.