(Photo: New York Times, July 10, 1863 – Note the “Retreat of Lee” sidebar, referring to Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg.)
Back in my library visiting days, I used to read old newspapers on microfilm. Not for research. For pleasure. I liked reading old stories and looking at corny print ads. Sometimes I’d go as far back as the early 1900s to read about the day-to-day concerns of local people.
Thanks to Google (and numerous other databases), a trip to the library for research is practically obsolete (though I highly recommend the occasional pleasure trip). Yesterday the search engine giant introduced a news archive search feature. You can search as far back as the 1700s. The search is free, but you may have to pay to read the publications that turn up.
I experimented to see how far back I could go for Thomas Edison, Booker T. Washington, and Queen Victoria.
If I wanted to read about Washington’s education lecture at the Colored Young Men’s Christian Association in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1894, I’d have to pay. If I were writing a book or research article about him, I definitely would.
Many newspapers already have archive searches, but Google’s feature aggregates results from multiple newspapers. Instead of going to 20 different sites to search, Google does the hunting for you, compiling a list in seconds.
I think it’s groovy.
Other archive databases:
Addendum: I forgot to mention another cool Google feature: the book search. You can download books in PDF in the public domain. For books still under copyright, you’ll get citations and excerpts. Several months ago, some publishers got their knickers in a wad because of the excerpts. Google countered with “fair use.”
Google is on a mission to digitize as many books as it can. This satire piece from The Onion is funny. Sort of.
As with newspaper archive searches, there are several free electronic book sites, including Project Gutenberg, ETEXT archives, and Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
