Black, and White, and Read All Over: Digitized Newspaper Resources

While traditional newspapers may not be the way of the future, they were definitely the way of the past. Here on AHA Today we’ve profiled a number of sites that feature digitized newspapers. Today, we round up some of those past posts and reconnect you to those resources. Know of other online digitized newspapers? Let us know in the comments.

Google

• Hear ye! Hear ye! Read all about it… online
  In September 2008, the news on the Official Google Blog was the launch of Google’s newspaper digitization project, which was then a new initiative meant to digitize millions of newspapers and make them available online.
• Exploring the Google News Timeline
  The next year, in April of 2009, Google unleashed the Google News Timeline. It pulled the data from digitized newspapers and other sources and presented this content in a visually interesting look across time.

Library of Congress

• First Drafts of History at Your Fingertips
  In 2007, we took a look at “Chronicling America,” a digital project of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.  At the time the site was, “Currently limited to providing access to 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between 1900 and 1910, the project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) is expected to add more newspapers for more years.” Since that post the site now offers “newspaper pages from 1860 to 1922” and has expanded on its original set of states and now also includes Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

Newseum

• Historical Moments Captured in the Newseum’s Front Page Archive
  Also in 2007, we checked out the Newseum’s daily collection of newspaper front pages (see the image in this blog post) from around the world, and perused their archive of front pages from major events. Most recently the Newseum added to its archive newspaper front pages from July 16, 2010 and May 28, 2010 on the Gulf oil spill.

Herstory

• The HerStory Scrapbook
  The HerStory Scrapbook site presents newspapers in a different way and on a specific topic: “the final four years of the women’s suffrage campaign.” The site presents the years of 1917, 1918, 1919, and 1920 and splits each year up into its 12 months. Within each month there are dates that correspond to newspaper clippings, an explanation of what’s going on, and a link to the New York Times archives. For example, on January 4, 1920, “The Times summarizes the key events of 1919, including those related to suffrage.” See a PDF of this digitized newspaper article here.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.