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History: Newspapers

Your guide to History resources in Lancaster University Library

Using newspapers in your research

Newspapers are a great source of information about life in a particular time period - they act as a snapshot of concerns of the day. It's not just the articles - for example, analysing advertisements in newspapers can reveal a lot about society at the time.

Lancaster has a wide range of newspapers, historical and current, from many countries around the world. Please see our newspapers and magazines guide for an up-to-date list of titles.

Alternatively you can search for titles in Onesearch, or using our A-Z of subscriptions.

Selection of Historical Newspaper Collections

Text Indexing vs Digitised Reproduction

Our world news databases Nexis and Access World News index the text of a large range of publications (e.g. New York Times, Financial Times, etc), and allow you to cross-search many publications at once - but they don't include photographs, adverts, or any of these sorts of surrounding materials that may be of interest and use to a historical researcher. 

For these materials, you are better consulting a primary sources database such as:

There are many more primary sources available to you - you can search the collections here.

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