US News Map - A Great Way to Explore Newspaper Archives

Earlier this summer I shared some ideas for encouraging students to do research in digital archives. The U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives.

The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemarker the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemarker. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website where you can also download a copy of the article. The U.S. News Map will let you search for articles published between 1789 and 1964.

In this short video I provide a demonstration of how to use the U.S. News Map to find historical newspaper articles.

Spark Interest in Local History With These Digital Newspaper Archives

When I was a kid I did yard work for an elderly widow who had stacks of old newspapers magazines that she and her husband collected. Knowing that history was my strongest subject in school, she always had a new, old newspaper (and a glass of fruit juice) for me whenever I came over to rake leaves, shovel snow, or mow the lawn. Looking at those old newspapers always sparked my curiosity about buildings, landmarks, and people in my hometown. One of those sparks of curiosity led me to figuring out who my favorite fishing pond was named after. 

The point of sharing that little story is that looking at old newspapers can inspire students to dive into a little local history research and gain a bit of knowledge about the formation of their communities as they know them today. To that end, here are three good places for students to browse through the digital archives of old newspapers. 

Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword.

In the Google Newspaper Archive you will find hundreds of digitized copies of newspapers printed around the world. In the archive you fill find newspapers published in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In this video I provide a demonstration of how to search Google's Newspaper Archive. 

Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. There is a highly detailed tutorial on how to use the LOC's Newspaper Navigator right on its search page. In general, the Newspaper Navigator is easy to use. That said, it's important to note that the search results are based on the tags associated with the images in the newspapers as opposed to the words on the pages themselves.

By the way, here's the story of my favorite childhood fishing pond. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.