Newspapers and news broadcasts (both current and historical) are a primary source. Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence about a subject. Primary sources are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources (e.g. newspapers and news broadcasts) are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later. Primary sources are characterized by their content, not their format (microfilm, digital, published, or original).
For more news sources, see the News guide.
See also Historical Newspapers tab for more online news archives.
Historical newspapers are a great primary resource. Many have been digitized and the full-text is searchable. Once you get to a website with the links below, you may need to read the help screen to learn how to search that particular website. If a newspaper has not been digitized, you may still find it on microfilm and will have to search it manually.
Coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped the continent during the 19th and early 20th centuries. From Algeria to Angola, Zambia to Zimbabwe, this resource chronicles the evolution of Africa through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, obituaries and other items.
African Newspapers: The British Library Collection features 64 newspapers from throughout Africa, all published before 1901. Originally archived by the British Library.
Open Access collection of newspapers produced by people who have been incarcerated. Includes two of the first prison publications, Forlorn Hope and Supporter, with more than 350 titles identified for inclusion.
The UCLA Library has many newspapers in its collections that have not been digitized. They are not easily searchable in the UCLA Library Catalog if you do not know the title of the newspaper. If you are looking for newspapers from a specific city, you can search WorldCat via Firstsearch (requires the UCLA VPN from off-campus to access) and limit to newspapers in the UCLA Library. The search strategy to use is:
The results will be a list of newspapers from the publisher location searched.
Patrons can also use the freely available web version of WorldCat to search for newspapers and periodicals in library collections.
Selected Southern California newspapers are listed below: