October is playoff season in baseball, culminating in the World Series at the end of the month. In its 110-year history, World Series teams have had their share of making headline news.

The first World Series championship was held in 1903. The Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning five games in the best-of-nine series at Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in Boston. A few things have changed since then, including a name change to the Boston Red Sox, a different stadium—Boston’s beloved Fenway Park—and of course, a shorter best-of-seven series. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the victory which brought “great rejoicing in the City of Culture.”

A banner proclaiming “National pastime no more until end of world war” and “Boston Red Sox are un-crowned kings of 1918 season” tops a page in The Indianapolis News filled with headlines, game stats, and opinions about that year’s World Series. It would be Boston’s last 20th-century world championship. However, declaring “1918 is history” in 2004, The Hays Daily News in Kansas devoted an entire page to the history-making win with additional headlines of “Red Sox end years of disappointment,” “From cursed to first,” and “Boston fans celebrate first title in 86 years.”

The Great War was over in 1918 so the game resumed despite the previous year’s announcement. In 1919, the Chicago Daily Tribune sponsored an electric scoreboard on the front of the Colonnade building so fans outside the park could keep up with the action. In far-away San Bernardino County, California, fans could listen to the games and watch the electric board at the Opera House.

Those who remember their baseball history know that the 1919 World Series was marred by scandal. It was another best-of-nine series, this time between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Known as the Black Sox Scandal, some members of the White Sox team plotted with gamblers to lose the series. The Tribune published the “Inside Story of Plot to Buy World’s Series” in their September 25, 1920, edition.

Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier in 1947, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that also made it to the World Series that year. Jackie’s mother flew East to watch him play. The Dodgers lost to the Yankees in seven games—their 11^th World Series win.

In over a century of World Series history, there are a lot of highs and lows reflected in the headlines of home-team papers and in the sports pages of newspapers around the country. Catch up on the latest in historical headlines on Newspapers.com.

We’re in the midst of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. Eighty-five years ago, in 1928, before hurricanes were officially named, a storm known as San Felipe II, the Storm of ’28, and the Lake Okeechobee Hurricane killed over 5,000 people in Puerto Rico and Florida. The climactic climatic news filled our nation’s headlines. It remains the second deadliest tropical storm in U.S. history.

The hurricane hit Puerto Rico (spelled “Porto Rico” in the newspapers of the day) on Thursday, September 13, made landfall near Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday, September 15, and continued to Lake Okeechobee where its impact was devastating.

Galveston, Texas, the site of the worst hurricane in U.S. history in 1900, reported early estimates of the death toll rising into four figures even before the full impact of the Lake Okeechobee flooding was known. A front-page article in The Indianapolis News on August 15, 1928, proclaimed “Lake Okeechobee Now Florida Sea” when Florida’s largest lake grew to become an inland sea when a storm surge breached a dike, a scenario all too familiar to those who survived Hurricane Katrina eight years ago. Early estimates of lives lost were under 2,000, yet current tallies put the figure closer to 2,500.

Estimates of fatalities in the Caribbean approached the same number. The Portsmouth Daily Times of Ohio reported that thousands were dead and as many as a million, or half the island’s population, were homeless. Famine was a very real concern. A descriptive first-hand account by a boy in Puerto Rico was published a couple weeks later in Maryland’s Denton Journal. Two months afterward, The Indian Journal of Eufaula, Oklahoma, reported that Americans raised $5 million in relief for the victims.

The Reading Times in Pennsylvania published photos from Palm Beach and San Juan, while The Indiana Gazette printed a photo of the hurricane “in action,” and a map of the path of the Porto Rico-Florida storm. By September 19, stories were flooding the dailies, with first-hand accounts of heroism and narrow escapes. Surely, however, someone could have chosen a less-offensive headline than “Among the Missing” for a story that followed this last, which appeared in The Bee of Danville, Virginia. It was a joke about a missing husband used as filler and unrelated to the storm.

Search Newspapers.com for news of how hurricanes and other natural disasters may have affected your family and the communities in which they lived. And, please stay safe this hurricane season.

On August 27, 1910, the New York Times reported that Thomas A. Edison exhibited his new kinetoscope to a small audience in West Orange, New Jersey. It was reported as the first demonstration of his moving picture invention synchronized with sound.

The article noted that a man entered the frame of the film and as his lips moved the sound of his voice issued from the concealed phonograph. The illusion was reported to be “perfect” and Edison’s “plans for the future of his kinetoscope are boundless.”

Edison boasted that he would not be satisfied creating simple moving and talking picture shows, but wanted “to give grand opera” to people in “far stranded towns.” The next day, another Times reporter opined that the new invention would never “supplant opera and drama in its natural form,” but might increase demand “by cultivating the taste of the multitude.” Looking back now, over a hundred years later, the success of that point is debatable!

The Indiana Democrat mentioned Edison’s talking picture demonstration with a scant one-sentence report a few days later. The Springfield Missouri Republican marveled that the man in Edison’s film “dropped a dish or two and the crash sounded as natural as the real thing” and that the “experiment gave assurance that in a year the moving picture will also be a talking picture.” News reached across the pond to London where The Times reported that it “will soon be ready for general use.”

Talking pictures produced by Hollywood were still many years in the making, despite Edison’s hope for a speedier launch. When The Jazz Singer debuted in 1927, it revolutionized the film industry and notoriously upset things in the 1952 musical Singing in the Rain. In that fictional account, a man demonstrated talking pictures by getting quite close to the camera to say, “Notice, it is a picture of me and I am talking. Note how my lips and the sound issuing from them are synchronized together in perfect unison.” We can imagine it may have been similar to Edison’s 1910 demonstration.

Headline news of the past brings a fresh perspective to many things we take for granted today. Catch up on many more historic events by immersing yourself in the headlines and stories on Newspapers.com.