The story reads like a tale from a 1930s pulp fiction magazine: A cross-dressing Manchu princess makes a daring a nighttime escape by horseback across the steppes, becomes a spy for the Japanese...
Lunchtime. Wall Street, September 16, 1920. Secretaries and clerks crowded the streets of the financial district as a man parked a horse-drawn wagon opposite the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank...
An American author and literary figure in the last quarter of the 19th century, Lafcadio Hearn was known for his fiction and his reportage from the Caribbean and Japan. His own life, however, was as...
In light of the current spectacle of statues of Confederate leaders being removed from the streets of New Orleans in the dead of night by masked workers, here is journalist Lafcadio Hearn commenting...
The proliferation of fake news during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election continues to make fresh headlines. Although today’s delivery system is different, the creation and sharing of fake...
July 1, 2016, marks the 100th anniversary of the day the British army suffered the worst losses in its history, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. American newspapers and news services had...
Every U.S. presidential election attracts worldwide interest, and Reports from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service—available from Readex in a unique digital edition—provide English-language...
In the century following the end of the Civil War, brutal assaults on black people and their neighborhoods by mobs of white people, often described as "race riots," were intended, in part, to blunt...
From 1941 to 1996 the U.S. government published the Daily Report of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). FBIS was begun in 1941 as a means of letting the government know what propaganda...
One joy of 19th-century American newspapers is reading the columns devoted to non-news things. The example seen below—published on page three of the Indiana State Journal on August 11, 1897—is...
Beginning on April 25, 1945, as World War II entered its final months, delegates from dozens of nations gathered at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Their goal was the creation of an...
Journalist Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), noted editor of the New York Sun, delivered a lecture on “The Making of a Newspaper Man” at Cornell University on January 11, 1894. This lecture and two related...
In the 1960s and 1970s, the advertising campaign for Tareyton Cigarettes upset grammarians, teachers and others. “Us Tareyton Smokers Would Rather Fight Than Switch,” the ad copy proclaimed. The...
In the mid-1930s, when he presented these fashion rules, Chiang Kai-shek was political leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, head of the country's army, and nominally China’s leader. China, however...
January 24, 2015, was the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death. The soldier, politician and writer lived a long and notable life, which was extensively covered in American newspapers. From...
Reliving a moment in history through the pages of America’s Historical Newspapers takes the event out of its place on the timeline of history and reinserts it into the messy context of its era. The...
August 2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of what we now call World War I. The wars in Europe since 1815 had been brief affairs. The expectation was that this would also be brief...
It was worldwide news when Chairman Mao Tse-tung, “the great leader of the Chinese people,” went for a swim in the Yangtze River on July 16, 1966. According to Peking NCNA International Service in...
From 230 years ago, as reprinted in the New-York Gazetteer or Northern Intelligencer on the first of September 1783: Click to open full article n PDF. "The four Winds (the Initials of which make the...
This year's U.S. Open marked the 100th anniversary of one of golf’s most memorable moments: the incredible performance of a 20-year-old amateur in the same event in 1913. Francis Ouimet’s win—the most...
Ascents of Everest are now so numerous they often don’t make the news anymore, unless there is a devastating loss of life, a brawl among Sherpas and climbers or a race between octogenarians to become...
This newspaper page from a century ago features a complex layout of amateur and professional sports heroes, established and up-and-coming, two- and four-legged. Found among the 40 photographs are...
One of the pleasures of using America’s Historical Newspapers is the ability to come across remarkable yet little known individuals like Theos Bernard. This Arizona native and Columbia University...
Irving Berlin, the great American songwriter, needs little introduction today, but the great singer Mary Garden is less well known. She was an opera star in the first three decades of the 20th century...
