Readers of Sherlock Holmes stories will remember that The Times’ “agony column” was the first thing Holmes read in the morning: the personal notices, which took up most of the first page of the newspaper. Holmes also posted his own notices to attract response from people who might be involved in the case he was [more...]
In today’s world of 24 hour news, the internet, fibre optic technology, twitter and telephones, news travels in a matter of seconds from one place to another, from city to city, continent to continent. But before the electronic age, how fast did news travel? I thought I would look at some events of the 19th [more...]
We take for granted nowadays the easy and relatively cheap access to news and information through the internet, newspapers, radio and television, but there was a time in Britain when for the working class the cost of newspapers was beyond their means because of government taxes. In early 19th century Britain there was an advertisement [more...]
Newspapers are always trying to increase their circulation and one option they try are readers’ competitions, sometimes involving thousands of pounds in prizes. One early type of competition involved readers having to track down and identify the newspaper’s ‘mystery man’ who could be found in a particular area of a town or city. If successful, [more...]
The French people have an amazing history, a beautiful language, and a justifiable pride in their culture. But they’ve done a surprisingly poor job of preserving these things in the form of French-language online newspaper archives. Still, there are a few good sources to know about, from France and other French-speaking areas, such as Quebec [more...]
Online newspaper archives are a wonderful source for researching your ancestors, studying history, learning more about your family, hometown or roots, or simply browsing to learn what was happening in day-to-day life in earlier times. There are some wonderful free newspaper archives online covering history and news in Canada. Did I mention they’re free? Take a look! Canadian [more...]
There are literally billions of pages of newspaper archives available online. Only a small portion of them are from the UK, and a still smaller portion can be viewed for free. Nonetheless, the few free archives that are available from England, Scotland and Ireland are a rich source of history writ large and small. Here [more...]