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World Newspaper Archive

Created with the Center for Research Libraries
Summary
Learn what makes these products unique
  • International newspapers offer new perspectives on national and global issues
  • Exact digital replicas published in English and a variety of other languages
  • Expertly selected publications from Africa, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia

Representing the largest fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from around the globe, the World Newspaper Archive will advance research and offer opportunities for fresh insight across wide-ranging academic disciplines. This expanding online resource was created in partnership between Readex, a division of NewsBank, and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)—one of the world's largest and most important newspaper repositories—and includes historical newspapers published in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and other regions.

Providing exact digital replicas of newspapers published in English and a variety of other languages, the World Newspaper Archive chronicles the history and politics of diverse peoples and cultures during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative updates, letters, poetry, advertisements, matrimony and death notices and more, these historical newspapers offer students, teachers and scholars new perspectives on local, national and global issues as well as on daily life around the world.

Wide-ranging newspaper coverage of world history
Using the World Newspaper Archive, researchers can compare perspectives and track topics related to repercussions of the Atlantic slave trade; the Zulu Wars; colonial rule in Africa and the Indian subcontinent; Hindu-Muslim conflicts; beginning of Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent resistance movement; the Mexican Revolution; independence movements in Argentina, Venezuela and neighboring countries; and much more. Every historical newspaper in the World Newspaper Archive has been carefully selected by CRL and its expert advisory boards. In addition, the World Newspaper Archive may also be searched with America's Historical Newspapers for unprecedented local, national and international coverage.

In partnership with the Center for Research Libraries
The Center for Research Libraries and its partners are committed to providing sustainable access to a rich and diverse set of international scholarly resources. CRL will provide for the archiving of the microform and digital content of the collection to ensure continuous long-term accessibility of those materials to the community.

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Reviews & Accolades

"Readex, a division of NewsBank, has long been a provider known for its high quality digital collections of early books, documents, and newspapers, particularly America’s Historical Newspapers database of American newspapers from colonial times and the days of the early republic. With the World Newspaper Archive Collection, Readex has partnered with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to provide access to historical newspapers from other regions, giving historians, language specialists, political scientists, and other researchers the opportunity to explore these ephemeral primary texts. To date Readex offers nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspaper collections from Africa...South Asia, and an impressive collection from Latin America."
-- David D. Oberhelman, Professor, Humanities-Social Sciences Division, Edmon Low Library, Oklahoma State University in Reference Reviews (2013, Volume 27, Number 1)

 “In the detailed account of the outbreak of plague in Santos, or the larger story of the changing epidemiological environment and its consequences in Brazil, there are new digital history tools at our disposal, including Latin American Newspapers, 1805-1922. In the last decade historians have witnessed a revolution in digitizing and OCR technology. This has allowed millions of pages of old newspapers to be digitized, converted to machine readable text, placed within database programs and made accessible on the Internet. As a result, the proverbial needle in the haystack can be now found by typing ‘needle’ into a search bar.”
— Ian Olivo Read, author of The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822-1889 (Stanford University Press, 2012)

Latin American Newspapers, 1805-1922 and the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 are two databases of great importance for Latin American studies. Together they provide more than 30 newspapers and 400,000 government documents that provide Latin American researchers with access to critical historical information without requiring travel to the United States or neighboring countries. These high-quality Readex collections offer new opportunities to explore, understand and reveal our own history; both are of huge value to historical researchers in many different fields of the humanities and social sciences.”
— Prof. Kátia Couto, Department of History, Universidade Federal do Amazonas-UFAM

"I am astonished at the quantity of available material in the Readex digital collections. I am studying South African leader Sol Plaatje's involvement as a politician and journalist in pre-apartheid resistance movements. The Readex African Newspapers collection, which includes the newspapers he edited, has been critical to my research."
— Raquel G. A. Gomes, Doctoral Candidate, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil

Notable Titles
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MARC-Records
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FAQS
Advisory Board

Adán Benavides 
Librarian for Research Programs
Benson Latin American Collection
The University of Texas at Austin

Frank Conaway 
Social Science Bibliographer
University of Chicago Library

Chuck Eckman 
Associate University Librarian & Director of Collections
The University of California, Berkeley Library

Sharon Farb 
Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Dan Hazen 
Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Collection Development
Harvard University

Denise Hibay 
Interim Director for Collections Strategy
New York Public Library

John E. Ingram 
Senior Associate Dean of University Libraries
University of Florida

Glenda J Pearson 
Head, Microforms and Newspapers Collection
University of Washington

Mary Stuart 
Professor, History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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