How Do I Find Historical Newspaper Databases?
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2019-11-20

The University of Alabama Libraries: libraries.ua.edu
We provide access to several dozen historical news databases representing varied places, times, and perspectives. This video demonstrates how to locate these resources, introduces a few popular choices,  and how to go about choosing the right one for your project. 

Hi, my name is Alex and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to find historical newspapers on The University of Alabama Libraries website historical newspaper databases. 

A newspaper database allows you to search a collection of individual newspapers all at once. Usually these databases are organized by time period, location, or some sort of theme. For example, Early American Newspapers includes access to papers from as early as 1690, so it would be a go-to for studying Colonial America. African American Newspapers includes a range of African African papers dating back to 1827 ProQuest Historical Newspapers is great for some of The United States' biggest papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal while Newspapers.com includes big and small town papers from across the country. 

To find historical newspaper databases, you can start by going to the Libraries' website and then choosing 'databases'. If you know of a specific database, you can look for it via the search bar but your most efficient option will be to use the search filters at the top of the screen. Let's choose 'database types' and then 'newspapers'. A quick disclaimer - not all of these are historical newspaper databases. Several of them offer full-text access to current issues of newspapers and some provide access to newspapers from the much more recent past. 

If you want to find newspapers about a certain historical event or subject, you should try our Research Guides. You might look at some of our guides for communications or you could look at our history guides.

For example, if you select our "American Civil War" guide you can see all the newspaper databases that we consider especially relevant for that subject. 

And that's all for this tutorial. Hopefully you learned the basics of finding our historical newspaper databases, and if you have any questions just ask a librarian.