Research Guides: Historical U.S. Newspapers: Historical Newspapers on the Internet

What about the Internet?

In addition to subscription databases available through the UMD Libraries, there is also a wealth of knowledge about American newspapers online. Sites range from massive full-text databases managed by the federal government to personal webpages of librarians and collectors. This page provides a brief introduction to some of the most useful and popular resources available today. Use this page as a guide to what's available, but feel free to go beyond it.

Most Helpful Sites

The following sites contain information about hundreds of historical U.S. newspapers. In many cases, full text and images of the newspaper pages are available.

Chronicling America (Library of Congress)
This site is one of the best available for finding information about America's historical newspapers. Chronicling America has two main features:

US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present: This feature is used to search for newspapers by location, date of publication, area of focus, and so on. The directory provides full bibliographic information for each newspaper and indicates where copies of the newspaper can be found in a library.

Digitized Newspapers 1836-1922: The Library of Congress has also made available digitized images of select newspapers.
Google Newspaper Archive
Google has digitized a number of newspapers from the United States and other countries and made the searchable archive available online. Coverage is spotty in many cases, but the archive can be especially helpful in locating small, local newspapers.
Newspaper Map
This neat mashup overlays information about newspapers published worldwide onto a Google map. It allows one to visually browse for newspapers by location. The main page provides links to currently published newspapers, while information about historical newspapers can be obtained by clicking on the "hist" button at the top.
NewspaperCat
Similar to WorldCat, this tool facilitates the discovery of online, digitized historical newspapers from the United States and the Caribbean. The site is hosted by the University of Florida libraries.
Online Newspaper Archives/Indexes/Morgues (Library of Congress)
This site provides an aggregated list of online newspaper indexes, catalogs, and archives. There is a general list of resources as well as two lists broken down by state.
U.S. News Archives on the Web
This site, maintained by the Special Libraries Association, provides a state-by-state list of online archives of individual newspapers. Many newspapers provide archives of back issues directly on their commercial sites. Some archives provide free access to historical articles, while others charge a fee.

Other, Specialized Collections

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Published from 1841 to 1955, this newspaper chronicles the events from a transformative era in American history. The Brooklyn Public Library is working to digitize the microfilm archives of the paper, having completed the years 1841-1902.
Farm, Field, and Fireside
Presented by the University of Illinois, this digital collection features agricultural weekly newspapers from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers
The Pennsylvania State University provides access to this collection of Civil War era newspapers, circa 1831-1877.
Stars and Stripes (1918-1919)
From February 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919, by order of General John J. Pershing, the United States Army published a newspaper for its forces in France called The Stars and Stripes. This online collection, presented by the Library of Congress, includes the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper's World War I edition.