These digitized newspapers are full-text searchable online.
Provides access to digitized historic American newspapers from 1789 to 1963, allowing users to explore local, regional, and national news coverage.
Produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), this website archives information about historic newspapers from across the United States and between 1756 to 1963. A variety of search options are available, including by state, ethnicity, language, newspaper title, or date of publication. Each digitized page may be viewed as an image or text in the browser, or it may be downloaded in PDF or JPG.
A digital archive offering access to historical Catholic publications, news articles, and resources, providing insights into Catholic life, issues, and events over time.
This full-text searchable newspaper database includes Catholic publications from around the United States from 1832 to the present. In addition to newspapers with a national perspective, there are also newspapers from the diocese of Pittsburgh and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Newark, Saint Louis, Harford, Miami, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The Archive is a project of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA), an alliance of archives and libraries collaborating in support of the mission to provide access to Catholic research resources.
A digital archive providing access to historical African American newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries, offering insights into the Black experience and cultural history.
This fully-searchable collection of 280+ historical newspapers from across the United States published by and for African Americans is a one-of-a-kind record of African American history and culture. Each newspaper issue in this collection has been fully digitized and is fully searchable, including all articles, obituaries, advertisements, editorials, and illustrations. Some of the major titles in the collection include The Colored Citizen (KS), Arkansas State Press, Rights of All (NY), Wisconsin Afro-American, New York Age, L’Union (LA), Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate (NY), Richmond Planet, Cleveland Gazette, and The Appeal (MN). The oldest newspaper dates to 1842. Try the new Text Explorer to visualize data using methods such as term clustering, frequencies, trends, and more.
A digital archive providing access to articles and content from the Dayton Daily News since 1990, covering local news, events, and issues in Ohio for historical research and reference.
This collection provides access to the daily newspaper going back to 1990.
When searching in original primary sources such as historic newspapers, it's important to search using the terms and vocabulary that people at the time used. Using modern terminology will most likely cause you to find few, if any, relevant results. One example: the term "Great Migration" may not be used in all contemporary sources on this topic from 1910-1970 (although you may find it in some!).
Sometimes these historic terms may feel uncomfortable or even offensive, particularly when working on histories of racial issues, such as this project. It's okay to feel uncomfortable or offended! Encountering and reckoning with these terms is an often-unavoidable part of doing historical research. It's okay to pause your search and take a few minutes to process how these terms make you feel. We know now how harmful these terms are, but working with primary sources means encountering terms that were used during a time when they were considered acceptable.
With that in mind, here are some suggested terms to try in your keyword searches:
Negro OR colored
Resurrection Catholic Church OR Resurrection Parish [or similar variations]
St. John Catholic Church OR St. John Parish [or similar variations]
St. James Catholic Church OR St. James Parish [or similar variations]
You may wish to try searches that combine several keywords, such as "Holy Ghost Fathers" AND "St. John" AND Dayton.
You may come across names of pastors and parishioners associated with the parish you're researching: these can be important search terms, too! Consider expanding the range of times and places for more context on people like Fr. Egbert Figaro, Dayton's first Black priest, and searching Spiritan resources for "Dayton" to find more local leaders. Variations can be helpful here, too: "Father Figaro" OR "Egbert Figaro" can expand your results.