I have a subscription to Time All Access and NY Times Times Machine, which give me access to every Time ever and every NY Times ever(actually, up until 2002 I believe). As far as I know, these are the only news publications to have their entire archives online.
It’s a blast too, reading about things in the context of the time rather than in a history book. Plus you encounter small stories that were too insignificant for the history books, but which make you wonder how it turned out.
One such story I came across today was a Time story dated Oct. 2, 1939. San Antonio Mayor Maury Maverick urged President Roosevelt to keep us out of war because he feared his son Maury Jr. was likely to die if the US wen to war. So of course i just had to know how poor Maury Jr. fared.
According to wikipedia, Maury Jr. served in the Marine Corps and did indeed survive the war. He even ran for Senate in Texas, but finished fourth in the primary. He did serve in the Texas House. He died in 2003, an anti-Iraq war advocate.
And that’s one of many reasons why these services are essential if you are interested in this kind of stuff. Cheap too, Time is $2.99. I forget how much NY Times is, something like $10/month. But the Times goes back to 1852 or so, so you can get Civil War stuff in there.
Also a shout out to Facts on File, who unfortunately stopped publishing their Weekly World News digest in 2010 I believe(can’t find ANY explanation on the internet for why they stopped, or even an announcement that they were stopping). Facts on File started in 1941 with the goal of being a true fair and balanced news magazine and succeeded so well that only institutions bought their product because it was so dry. No pictures except maybe one on the first page if the event was REALLY huge, no opinions, no analysis, just straight up facts about what happened and who said what. I’ve been buying up their yearbooks from Amazon sellers as fast as I can acquire them.
I know some in Spanish and expect there will be other sources in other languages.
Diario de Navarra have theirs, but it’s in Spanish; I remember hearing about a possible project to upload the materials from the defunct El Pensamiento Navarro as well, but I think that one isn’t complete. RTVE (Spain’s “PBS”) has a ton of their footage and of other graphic sources, such as NODO (the newsreels which used to go before movies in every theater in the country, for 38 years), but again in Spanish. They don’t have everything simply because there is so much of it, the project to upload it all is ongoing.
There is a free newspaper database from the Library of Congress–Chronicling America. While it doesn’t cover your time of interest, it covers hundreds of US newspapers from 1789-1922.
I work at a medical library and we maintain an extensive print journal archive, some going back to the mid-1800s. My favorite down-time activity at work is skimming through the early 20th century journals and looking at the ads.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer is online back to 1845.
Newspapers.com is a fairly inexpensive resource for papers all over the US. Fully searchable by text. They have 66 different papers from New York (both the state and the city). A quick glance down the list shows at least one from the late 1700s.
The National Library of Australia has an ongoing project to digitize Australian newspapers; the collection is, appropriately, called Trove. I found this snippet of an article from 1912 interesting: Coal Consumption Affecting Climate.
I hadn’t realised the link was known for so long.
Newspaperarchive.com overlaps with newspapers.com but they are sufficiently different that both need to be consulted for any serious research. There’s also newslibrary.com, but I’m not a member and don’t know its inner workings.
Many states now have free newspaper archives of papers in that state. California’s is pretty good. There are also Wyoming, South Carolina, South Dakota, Indiana, and many more.
Unz.org has the contents of many periodicals, including many after 1923. I don’t understand their policy, since many articles are blocked by them for copyright reasons, but you’ll find stuff there not available anyplace else.
Popular Science has an archive site, but everything there is available through Google Books and the interface is better. Google Books has enormous amounts of stuff that is not books.
The Pulp Magazine Archive has all sorts of eclectic stuff on it beyond pulp magazines and it’s grown every time I’ve looked at it.
