any on-line newspaper late 19th century US?

lorna_w

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My novel is set in the US, in the farm states, and I'm not there to meander down to a library and look through microfilm, drat it. So I was wondering if any of you had run across sites where there are images of pages from 1880-1900, preferably in the Midwest, small city or town. I just want to look at prices, drawings of fashion, local vs. national news, try to immerse myself in what they'd have been reading every week. I've done some googling, but with no results; I fear that I'll need the name of a newspaper to find this.

So if you know of any such thing on-line, pdfs or jpeg or other images, please let me know. Text only would be less thrilling, but more thrilling than nothing. And a book title of such a thing with photographic reproductions would be my third choice.

Many thanks.
 

PorterStarrByrd

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Chronicaling America is indeed ghood

I reasearching a novel that requires a reunion in 1894

I have found that that by using google advanced search and the date and year and the exact phrase line I get a lot of big picture stuff. Then I go back and enter a place (state, city, country) on the top (all of these words) line to get more specific info.
That will quickly lead you to both the newspaper stuff and other timeline items and significant stories. I'm sure you could also enter the word 'weather' after the location if you want some accuracy in your story too. Also I suppose a name of a person or group could be used. The possiblities are many.
 

lorna_w

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Thanks, both! I do want to slap whoever wrote the code for the search engine at chroniclingamerica now, but it's always good to have a new stranger to hate, lol. It did give me a couple the very right size in Iowa and Missouri, which is close enough.

Mr B, I'm fiddling with your ideas right now and surely something will come up.
 

Vito

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Google News Archive has images of old newspapers. The collection includes many small-town papers, some going back to the 19th century. You can view the results for free, although the large metropolitan papers (NYT, Los Angeles Times, etc.) are subscription-only.

Here's a tip:

After you've entered your search keyword on the Advanced Search page and the search results are listed, click "Archives" on the lower part of the left hand menu. Then, you can can use the "Custom Range" option to limit your search results by date (1875-1900, for example).

Here's the link:

http://news.google.com/news/advanced_news_search?as_drrb=a