Finding Newspaper Articles

Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes contains more information on finding newspapers and newspaper articles.

NewspaperARCHIVE offers numerous newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries.  Contains many small-city newspapers.

Birmingham assorted newspaper clippings (Birmingham Public Library)

ProQuest Historical Newspapers include illustrations, editorials, and advertising. Available papers are listed below.

General Newspapers

Search all ProQuest news sources using: Proquest News & Newspapers.  Search across all newspapers, or select a custom group of titles to search across, rather than searching just one title.

America’s Historical Newspapers (1690-1993)  (Readex) offers full text of over a thousand U.S. newspapers. Includes all papers listed in the standard History and bibliography of American newspapers, 1690-1820, by Clarence S. Brigham. Although a very rich resource, many important newspapers, especially for the later years, are not included.  Now includes several post-1922 papers; title list (In Quick Facts & Overview box on the right).

Minority Papers

Research Guides:

Ethnic American Newspapers from the Balch Collection (1799-1971) in America’s Historical Newspapers. Title list (In Quick Facts & Overview box on the right). The titles marked Forthcoming are in fact available now.

Ethnic NewsWatch (1959- ) offers full-text of 90 newspapers and other periodicals (1990- ) and of 30 African American, Hispanic American, and Native American newspapers and other periodicals (1959-1989). Includes book/film/television reviews. Lists of periodicals by ethnicity. Covers:

  • African American
  • Arab American
  • Asian American
  • European American
  • Hispanic/Latino/Chicano
  • Jewish
  • Native American

ProQuest Historical Newspapers include illustrations, editorials, and advertising. African-American papers are listed below.

All or several of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers can be searched at once from the ProQuest Databases page: from any of the individual ProQuest Historical Newspapers pages, hit the "Searching; 1 database" link, scroll down to the ProQuest Historical Newspapers section and select the ones you want.

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998 includes 270 newspapers from 36 states. It is a subset of America's Historical Newspapers (Readex).

Newspaper Digitization Projects

There are numerous local digitization projects. Even where payment is required for full text, searching is often free.

Try searching for your title in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).

PastPages offers front pages from news sites. Pages are archived hourly.

Newspaper Research Links offers state/province lists of digitized newspaper projects

The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers  (NewspaperCat) for newspapers published in the United States and the Caribbean.

Google News Archive: Alphabetical list.

Lists:

Illustrations

AP Multimedia Archive (AccuNet) is a searchable database of over 700,000 Associated Press photographs, charts and other graphics from the 1840s to the present.

Information on Newspapers

N.W. Ayer & Son's directory of newspapers and periodicals [title varies], 1880-1982.
LOCATION: Widener: AL 6.3 (1880-1881, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1910, 1912, 1914, 1917, 1919-1923, 1926-1929, 1931-1932, 1934-1935, 1938-1969, 1970-1982))

In a section (usually called Lists, Classifications or Subject Indexes) after the main geographical sequence are lists of agricultural, college, foreign language, Black (early called colored, then Negro), religious, fraternal (early called secret societies), trade and technical (including scientific and medical), and labor publications which carry advertising. The foregoing categories may have their own headings or may be included, with many others, within the Trade, Technical and Class section.

Includes circulation statistics and sometimes political orientation.

Broadcast News

Television News of the Civil Rights Era 1950-1970

Television News Archive (Vanderbilt University) (1968-) indexes the collection of network television news programs at Vanderbilt University. Abstracts searchable by keyword to find information and/or request videotape loans. Online video is available for CNN news broadcasts from October 1995 to the present.

American History in Video has numerous modern documentaries together with newsreels from 1929 to the present.

Internet Archive includes films, radio audio clips, news clips, educational films, advertisements, industry films, etc.