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History & Historical Writing: Finding Newspaper articles

A general guide for History and Historical Writing

How to find Newspaper articles

There are many different newspapers collected at SCU Library.  There are many physical newspapers in the Archives and Special Collections (see the page on Archives), but most newspapers in the University Library are digitized and you can search and read them online just like a journal article.

Some very prominent newspapers have their own collections, such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or San Francisco Chronicle.  Some smaller newspapers are collected in general historical newspaper databases.  Use the same techniques to search these databases that you would for JSTOR or Academic Search Complete by using multiple key words and filters.

Remember to check your citation guide to use the format for citing newspapers.

Below is a list of suggested newspaper databases for this class.

Suggested Newspaper Databases

Other collections of magazines and newspapers online

Huge backfiles of an amazing array of old magazines are available through Google Books. You can see a list here:

https://books.google.com/books/magazines/language/en

The issue you see in that list appears to be the most recent issue available, so, to see how far back they go and more easily browse by date, click on About this magazine under the magazine picture. It's a very odd mixture of thing, but there's some buried treasure along with the curiosities (Weekly World News!!). Here's a few titles worth getting excited about & the year of the earliest issue:  Billboard (1942),  Boy's Life (1911), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), The Crisis (1911), Ebony (1959), Jet (1951), Life (1936)Popular Science (1910), Yoga Journal (1975).

Another strategy for finding digitized anything about a specific place is to look at the website for the public library or a university library in the area of interest.

You can thank genealogy researchers for two other potentially very valuable resources for collections of digitized newspapers -- from Ancestry.com you get Newspapers.com and then there is Newspaper Archive. In both cases, you can sign up to get free access for 7 days in each case, so, plan accordingly!

Below are some additional projects around newspapers.

A good way to find newspaper digitization projects is to do a Google search formatted like this:

[name of a state] newspaper archives

as in:

virginia newspaper archives

Uniquely California!

Thank UC Riverside for the California Digital Newspaper Collection. There are real jewels in here. Best way to find what is available is to BROWSE by Date or County