Thursday, October 8, 2020
Online Newspaper Archives a Source of Interesting Material
In Stephen King's fantastic 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63 protagonist Jake Epping repeatedly finds himself investigating newspaper archives on the Internet...I'm familiar with that because I used to do the same at the University of Florida Library West microfilm room back in the 1980s, years before it became possible to access old newspapers online. A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to such a service being provided by a genealogy company and have been exploring them once again...guess I don't need to go back to UF anytime soon after all. With archived newspapers you get a great glimpse at the ongoing news and sports stories...as well as the opinions and assumptions that people entertained back then. Often it's the editorial page and the regular columns that provide the greatest insight, but sometimes you can get a lot by simply reading advertisements and comics. And speaking of comics, delving back into the past is a definite trip down memory lane for me as I reexperience the old strips like L'il Abner, Nancy, Calvin & Hobbes, Herman, Henry, Pogo, Miss Peach, They'll Do It Every Time, Zippy, The Far Side, Bloom County, Cathy, and so on. And it's also very easy to clip and print various puzzles I see, to do later and elsewhere at my own convenience. Unfortunately, the particular service I'm using isn't up to date with my local Gainesville Sun, although it does feature several papers...including my favorite Miami Herald going back to 1911...and Ft. Lauderdale is covered by its own paper throughout my school years in south Florida. As for the Gainesville Sun, Google has its own free archive service providing coverage from 1981 to 2007. From time to time on this blog I may be discussing some finds I make as I browse through the past. Seeing how we are approaching yet another presidential election, I'm thinking of looking back at some from the past and how the papers with their editorial pages assessed them just before they took place...
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