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United States History

Primary and secondary sources for the study of US History

Librarian

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Michelle Brasseur
she/her
Contact:
Young Research Library, Level A

Newspaper Tips

The list of newspapers presented here is not comprehensive. To see if we have newspapers from a particular region or time period, you can do a Subject Search in UC Library Search for:

"california newspapers"

You can also add additional keywords to narrow the search.

For example:

"armenian california newspapers" 

Union Lists of Newspapers

When doing research on the history of a region, it is often helpful to discover what newspapers existing in the region during a particular time period. Union lists are bibliographies containing publications held at a variety of libraries. 

You can do a Subject Search in UC Library Search for:

"union lists newspapers"

You can narrow the search by adding a location name. 
For example:

"union lists newspapers California"

or

"American union lists newspapers"

Broadcast News

Newspapers

For current newspaper access, your best bet is either to look up the newspaper title in our catalog or search Lexis Nexis or Factiva. For alternative press, you can also try Alt-Press Watch and Ethnic News Watch.

Historical newspapers can be more tricky to access. Many have not been digitized, so you may have to look at microfilm or print copies. Some have not even been indexed which means you have to figure out a date or range of dates and browse manually for information.

Frequently, historians want access to circulation data. This is not easy to get but contemporary circulation data for many papers can be found at the Audit Bureau of Circulation's website. The ABC's historical data reaches back as far as 1914 but is only available to Audit Bureau members.

Here are some good historical newspapers available online:

Newspaper Collections

Major US Newspapers

African American Newspapers