Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Experience the trials and triumphs of a growing nation through nineteenth-century America's newspaper coverage
As the new American nation emerged in the 1800s, the first draft of its history was written by those who experienced and recorded it on the pages of urban and rural newspapers. As the primary source of news and information on national and local affairs, these pages are invaluable for historical research across a spectrum of subjects. Gale's Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers -- a full-text searchable, facsimile-image database -- provides an as-it-happened window on events, culture, and daily life in nineteenth-century America that is of interest to both professional and general researchers.
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The collection features publications of all kinds, from the political party newspapers at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the mammoth dailies that shaped the nation at the century's end. Every aspect of society and every region of the nation is found in the archive -- rural and urban, large cities and small towns, coast to coast, etc. Includes major newspapers as well as those published by African Americans, Native Americans, women's rights groups, labor groups, the Confederacy, and other groups and interests. Also included are illustrated papers that bring the nineteenth century to life through the drawings of many artists.
Newspapers included are:
- New York Herald (NY)
- Lynchburg Virginian (VA)
- Pacific Commercial Advertiser (HI)
- Rocky Mountain News (CO)
- Southern Illustrated News (VA)
- Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago)
- Milwaukee Sentinel (WI)
- The Bee (OH)
- The Mountaineer (SC)
In addition to coverage of the American Civil War, African American culture and history, westward migration, Antebellum-era life, and other major topics, the collection also includes scholarly essays on nineteenth-century American history written by prominent historians. Titles were selected by leading scholars of the nineteenth-century American press, and headnotes have been included for the individual titles.
Newspapers were the lifeblood of the new republic, and the contents of their pages helped shape the nation's identity, carrying not just the stories that unified American opinions, norms, and interests, but that also fueled the crucial debates of the day. The nineteenth-century press helped to create an environment of free expression that typified both the nation and its citizens. And with about 1.8 million pages archived -- the vast majority of which have never before been accessible online -- this easily accessed resource seems endless. The primary source content of Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers has been taken from many of the largest and most impressive collections of newspapers from all across the United States.
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FEATURED REVIEW
“Newspaper databases like this one will be of great interest to a variety of library users, from the general public searching genealogical records, to students of all levels, to historians doing primary research. Purchase of one (or more) digitized newspaper databases is essential for libraries.”
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Additional Details
subjects covered
- African-American Studies
- Gender & Women's Studies
- Humanities & Social Sciences
- Law & Legal Studies
- Science & Technology
- American Indian / Native American Studies
Support Materials
- Archives Explored: Notable Contributors
- Archives Explored: Notable Documents
- Essay: Confederate States of America
- Essay: Consumerism and Consumption
- Essay: Corporations and Big Business
- Essay: Fires and Firefighting
- Essay: Health and Disease
- Essay: Immigration and Immigrants: Anti-immigrant Sentiment
- Essay: Mining and Extraction
- Essay: Newspapers and the Press
- Essay: Setting the Agenda in the Antebellum Era
Platform Features & Tools
Term Frequency
Researchers can see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, events, and ideas interact and develop over time.
Topic Finder
By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information.
Cross-Search Capability
Search across the content of complementary primary source products in one intuitive environment, enabling innovative new research connections.
Reviews & Testimonials
“This is a career changer for me. In twenty minutes of goofing around I found information that would have utterly re-shaped my first and second book. I also found information that has now redirected by next monograph entirely.”
“On reflection, it is clear that the database, if used imaginatively and with some attention to detail, provides the capacity to open up a great amount of potential for future research on a huge range of subjects.”
“The 19th century United States newspapers database contains digital facsimile images of both full pages and clipped articles from hundreds of newspapers drawn from over 20 microfilm collections across the United States. Searching uses the Infotrac system and will be familiar to users of the The Times Digital Archive.”
