Newspapers can serve as useful primary sources for historical research. They reflect the time period in which they were created, and provide a contemporary glimpse into society. Scholars generally use newspapers for three purposes: learning facts about specific events; looking for long-term trends; and searching for details or the “texture” surrounding an event—a fact or story that illuminates or complicates a larger pattern.
America's Historical Newspapers
A growing collection allows users to search more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and 1998 (and beyond) from all 50 states. Created through partnerships with the American Antiquarian Society, Library of Congress, Wisconsin Historical Society and others.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
The Library of Congress's portal, for newspapers from 1789 through 1922.
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Features full-text content and images from newspapers from urban and rural regions throughout the U.S.
Archive of full-page newspaper images created from newspaper collections on microfilm, preserving the original format of the paper. Includes U.S., Canadian and foreign newspapers.
Provides full text for more than 40 national American and international newspapers, and selected full text for more than 200 regional American newspapers. Full text television and radio news transcripts are also included.
Proquest Historical Newspapers
Contains English language newspapers primarily from the United States (including some American Jewish newspapers) but has some non-American English language newspapers, including The Guardian (1821-2003) and The Observer (1791-2003), and Irish Times (1859-2011).
Richmond Daily Dispatch (1860-1865)
Searchable HTML text only.
For assistance, please contact the research librarians at the Kresge Law Library by email: AskUs@nd.edu.
Contemporary news coverage of Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824) from The Schenectady Cabinet (New York).
A 1966 Op. Ed. about the growth of the Supreme Court's power and the rise of "judicial activism" from the Dallas Morning News.