Here’s another great author resource for those with stories set in in the United Kingdom (or anywhere United Kingdom newspapers had correspondents) in the 250 years between 1710 and 1959. The British Newspaper Archive is scanning the British Library’s collection of newspapers. The goal is 40 milli0n pages, and they’re not quite quarter of the way through, but they already have 237 titles from all parts of the UK and Ireland, and from the entire time period.
For a payment (a one off payment for 40 pages in 365 days, or as many pages as you can devour on a monthly or annual subscription), you can search hundreds of millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title, and get the results and then the page where the article appears on your screen in an instant.
I haven’t subscribed yet, but it’s in next month’s budget. Leaf through their blog to see some great examples of stories (and newspaper pages), and of how people are using the resource. (The image to the right – of a page reporting the success of the Slave Trade Bill – was taken from their blog. Click on it to make it large enough to read.)
I remember the days when this site – or some similar site – was free through my university. A few days before I graduated, I downloaded sooooooooo many articles and whatever else I thought I’d want to read before my free access expired. The good old days….
There are two others sites I use really often for research:
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
https://archive.org/index.php
Found some really invaluable material through these two places.
Archive.org looks very cool.
‘Tis very very cool. I usually narrow my search to documents published between 1800 to usually 1867.