Old Newspapers, Part 2

I’ve been spending a lot of time combing through old newspapers for material pertinent to our Monocacy, Fort Stevens, and Johnson-Gilmor Raid project. As I mentioned here the other day, I found a lot of good material at the Ohio Historical Society going through reels of microfilm.

Today, I spent a fair amount of this morning digging through on-line archives of Civil War-era newspapers, and I wanted to share those sites with you. There is a tremendous amount of material available for free, and anyone interested in doing this sort of research should be aware of what’s available.

First is the granddaddy of them all, the New York Times. Until last year, the Times charged for access to its archives. However, those archives are now available for free here. Every article back to 1851 is available for free here, in full text format, and fully searchable. Needless to say, there is quite literally a ton of great material available here.

Another very useful source is the Brooklyn Eagle. The Brooklyn Public Library has digitized every issue from 1841 through 1902, all of which are fully searchable and available for free here. The Eagle often contains very useful information, and I found a number of good articles there today.

Penn State University has digitized a number of Pennsylvania’s Civil War-era newspapers here. They include The Philadelphia Press, the Bellefonte Democratic Watchman, the Columbia Spy, the Franklin Repository of Chambersburg, the Erie Observer, the Gettysburg Compiler, the Huntingdon Globe, the Waynesboro Village Record, and the Wellsboro Agitator. I found a ton of really useful material in these papers today, none of which has ever been used in any other treatment of these events.

The Library of Congress has also begun a program to digitize American newspapers. These are less useful, though, because only those articles after 1900 are available, and only the newspapers from a handful of states are presently available. The Library of Congress intends to further expand the program, and then it will become a really useful tool.

NewspaperArchive.com is another very useful site, but it’s not one that I’ve used previously. It appears to be a pay-to-play site, so I’m going to have to determine whether it’s worth the expenditure. However, it has a very large collection of available obscure newspapers, and it looks very promising. I will have to spend some more time there, familiarizing myself with the online collection there before deciding whether to subscribe.