LibGuides: U.S. History: Historical Newspapers: Open Access

Early American Newspapers

America's Historical Newspapers
Search American newspapers from 1690 through 1900.

Historical Newspaper Collections

These newspaper collections are open to all users. Many collections are the results of grant funded projects to preserve American History.

List by state

Alabama

Birmingham Iron Age,1874 to 1884.

California

California Digital Newspaper Collection,1849 to 1911

Colorado

Colorado's Historic Newspaper Collection, 1859 - 1924

Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, currently includes 147 newspapers published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923.

Florida

Florida Digital Newspaper Library, dates vary by publication, range includes 1821 to 2006.

Georgia

Georgia Historic Newspapers, 1750 to 1925

Illinois

Quincy Historical Newspaper Archive, dates vary by publication, range includes 1835 to 1890.

Kentucky

Northern Kentucky Newspaper Index, dates vary by publication, range includes 1841 to 1884. Most of the older newspapers are full-text. Some of the newer editions may only display the citation.

Minnesota

Winona Newspaper Project, dates vary by publication, range includes 1860 to 1946.

Missouri

Historic Missouri Newspaper Project, dates vary by publication, range includes 1857 to 1879.

Nevada

Las Vegas Age newspaper digital collection, from April 7, 1905-1915, 1917-1922, 1924.

New Jersey

Atlantic County Historic Newspapers, dates vay by publication, range includes 1860 to 1923. PDF quality varies from issue to issue.

New York

Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online, 1841-1902

Freedom's Journal, 1827 to 1829. First African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Issues are available in chronological order with no index or searching capability.

Northern New York Historical Newspapers, dates vary by publication, range includes 1811 to 2007

Suffolk Historic Newspapers, dates vary by publication, range includes 1839 to 1923

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvanial Civil War Newspapers, dates vary by publication, range includes 1831 to 1877.

Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, dates vary by publication, range includes 1895 to 1980.

South Carolina

New South Newspaper,1862-1866.

Utah

Utah Digital Newspapers, dates vary by publication, range includes 1890 to 1959

Virginia

Richmond Daily Dispatch, 1860 to 1865.

Virginia Gazette, 1736 to 1780.

Washington

Historic Newspapers in Washington State, dates vary by publication, ranges includes 1852 to 1892

Wisconsin

Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles, dates vary. The majority of the articles are from 1860 to 1940.

Native American Newspapers

D’Arcy McNickle Library (MT) Digitization of the publication covers the years 1956 to 1961, and 1971 to 1988. The Digital Char-Koosta News Project is a collaborative effort of the D’Arcy McNickle Library at Salish Kootenai College, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation and the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library of the University of Montana. Funded by the Institute of Museums and Library Services.

Tundra Times (AK), 1962 to 1997. Native American Alaskan Newspaper.

National Newspapers

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress), date range 1880-1910.

Making of America: Cornell University Library

Making of America: University of Michigan

Online Books Page: Serials Dates and topics vary.A large selection of open access U.S and international periodicals.

State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections

African American Newspapers Online Marist College

Other Newspaper Resources

Harper's Weekly
While Harper's Weekly is a longstanding publication, this website focuses on its coverage of the Civil War from 1861-1865.
New York Historical Newspapers
Newspaper Cat
The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) is a tool that facilitates the discovery of online digitized historical newspaper content from newspapers published in the United States and the Caribbean. NewspaperCat was funded by a grant from the George A. Smathers Libraries.
Search by keyword, newspaper title or by city, county or state to locate titles. From your search result, click on the link(s) to connect to the digital newspaper(s). In many cases, this content is keyword searchable, depending on the hosting organization.
NewspaperCat currently links to over 1,500 full-text newspaper titles with a goal to include links to as many US and Caribbean newspapers with archival digital content as possible. Plans are to expand the Catalog as newly digitized newspaper titles are located. If you would like to suggest a new title or become a project partner please click here!
Secession Era Editorials
Editorials from the 1850s debating the necessity of breaking up the Union.

Runaway Slave Ads

Louisiana Runaway Slave Ads
"The 'Louisiana Runaway Slave Advertisements, 1836-1865' collection is a comprehensive digital collection of advertisements and notices harvested from the newspapers digitized as part of the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project. In these advertisements people from Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley demonstrate their agency and resistance against the institutions of slavery and indentured servitude. The project team identified and cropped advertisements directly from the digital newspaper images, and they created full-text transcriptions and descriptive metadata. New advertisements will be added to the collection at regular intervals until the project’s completion around September 2016. Full issues of the newspapers from which advertisements were taken are available from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website. More information about the Digitizing Louisiana Newspapers Project can be found on the project’s homepage."
Maryland Runaway Slave Ads
Mississippi Runaway Slave Ads
"The Documenting Runaway Slaves (DRS) research project is a collaborative effort to document newspaper advertisements placed by masters seeking the capture and return of runaway slaves. Dr. Max Grivno and Dr. Douglas Chambers, lead researchers and faculty members in the Southern Miss Department of History, are focusing their pilot project on Mississippi, but plans are already in place to expand the research to the larger Gulf South, the rest of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

Runaway slave advertisements personalize history, providing important clues about the lives of slaves, their efforts at self-emancipation, and the viewpoints of their masters. The ads often include first and last names of the slaves and their masters, where they lived, ages, and names of the current and previous slaveholder. They sometimes also include reasons why the slave fled, possible destinations, clothing, special skills or talents, and personality features. This project will gather these documents and organize them into a full-text searchable online resource for academic researchers, genealogists and anyone who wants to learn more about this time period."
North Carolina Runaway Slave Ads
"The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840. These brief ads provide a glimpse into the social, economic, and cultural world of the American slave system and the specific experience within North Carolina. Working from microfilmed copies of these rare publications, the project team scanned the ads to provide digital images, create full-text transcripts and descriptive metadata, and develop a searchable database. The NCRSA website includes digital scans of the ads, contextual essays to address their historical research value, full text transcripts, an annotated bibliography to aid researchers, and a searchable database."
Virginia Runaway Slave Ads
"The Geography of Slavery project presents full transcriptions and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves and servants placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790, and is in the process of compiling advertisements well into the nineteenth century. In addition, the project offers a number of other documents related to slaves, servants, and slaveholders, including court records, other newspaper notices, slaveholder correspondence, and assorted literature about slavery and indentured servitude.

Collecting all this information in a single location allows users to search across advertisements and classes of documents in ways that would previously have been impossible. Searches allow users to find out what times of the year slaveholders were most likely to place advertisements for runaways, what skills advertised slaves were most likely to possess, and whether any patterns appear through time in flights of black slaves and white servants together, as well as to trace the progress through time of particular individuals, illuminating stories that may have previously been hidden from our eyes. In addition, users are able to map information from historical geographic locations, allowing them to generate dynamic maps from searches and to produce visual representations of the ranges of slaves' and servants' flight and capture across Virginia as well as throughout much of the Atlantic Ocean region."