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Need newspaper articles that pre-date the stories in Factiva or Nexis (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates)? Curious what was happening in your neighborhood a century ago? Historical newspapers are proliferating on the web, so here’s a quick roundup of both plain text and scanned microfilm (actual page images) databases…

ProQuest Historical Newspapers (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) has become a mother lode for U.S. newspapers. The database, which started with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal backfiles, now also includes historical coverage of the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. The source of the database is microfilm, so you display articles as they appeared in the paper, and can even flip through the pages of an entire issue.

The Times Digital Archive (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) provides image access to the Times of London.

Accessible Archives (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates) is a searchable plain-text collection of early U.S. papers, including the Pennsylvania Gazette, the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and a collection of 19th century African-American newspapers.

A great free historical newspaper on the web, of local interest, is the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, brought to you by the Brooklyn Public Library. It is a searchable, page image collection of the Brooklyn paper from 1841-1902.

Looking to search ethnic newspapers? You have a few options…

Via Columbia Libraries, you can access the full text of over 60 ethnic press titles via LexisNexis Academic (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates). TIP: Once connected, click on “Guided News Search,” then select “General News” as the category and “Ethnic News” as the source.

Columbia also subscribes to Ethnic NewsWatch (access restricted to current Columbia affiliates), another full text database, which includes both English and Spanish languages titles from across the U.S. The interface includes the ability to narrow your search by ethnic group.

In New York City, the Independent Press Association assembles the latest headlines from the ethnic press on their website (those not originally in English have been translated).

Lest you get the feeling this blog is only interested in electronic sources of information, I’ll add that the Journalism Library has a copy of the IPA’s ethnic press directory, Many Voices, One City, on the reference shelf at call number PN4882 .M36 2004g.