Historical Newspapers: Pro Tips for Newspaper Searchers

Tools to locate a newspaper either online or in a library:

Lists of online newspapers:

Directories and bibliographies

Search Tips for Historical Newspapers

If the exact date or name of the event is unknown, start with a broad search with any known information. Use the date filters to narrow down the number of results when possible.

• Use AND to find an event using all the words in a general search
  • Example: "Wayne Newton" AND Stardust AND contract

• Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases.
  • Example: “Las Vegas Great Santa Run”

• Use OR to include any of several possible search terms
  • Example: race OR 10k OR marathon
  • Example: "Hoover Dam" OR "Boulder Dam"

• Use NOT to find an event using a specific word but excluding other words that are unlikely to be found in relevant articles
  • Example: Flamingo NOT bird

• Spelling variants enable the search engine to recognize and match contemporary English and older English versions of a word, when appropriate. This can be overridden by placing the search terms in quotation marks
  • Example: Searching for theatre will also find theater
  • Example: Searching for “theatre” will ONLY find theatre
• The asterisk (*) can be used to replace one or more characters, at the right end (right-hand truncation) of a word, or in the middle of a word. 
  • Example: Searching for gambl* will pick up gamble, gambling, and gamblers 
  • Example: Searching for mari*uana will pick up marijuana and marihuana.
• Use the less than or greater than symbols to indicate before/after when searching numerical fields
  • Example: YR (>2003) will locate articles published after 2003
• PRE/# will find documents where these words are within some number of words (#) of each other in the specified order. 
  • Example: Irving PRE/3 Lazar will find ‘Irving Lazar’ and  ‘Irving "Swifty" Lazar’ and/or ‘Irving Paul "Swifty" Lazar’
• NEAR/# will find documents where the words are within some number of words (#) of each other, either before or after. 
  • Example:  "Colorado River" NEAR/6 compact will find sentences where the word "compact" appears within six words of "Colorado River," like "States signing the compact to allocate water from the Colorado River include Nevada, California, Arizona ..."
• Before the 1980s, non-celebrity women were often referred to in print by their husband’s name. If "Teddy Jane Binion" is unsuccessful, try Mrs. Benny Binion or Mrs. PRE/4 Binion 

Want to try fancy Boolean search operators to search the newspaper collections more precisely?