Come explore the Poughkeepsie Journal on Newspapers.com! The Poughkeepsie Journal is the oldest paper in New York State and one of the oldest in the country. With a Newspapers.com Basic subscription, you can see issues from 1785 through 1922; or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access the years previously listed and additional issues from 1922 to May 2016.
You may notice on the browse menu for the Poughkeepsie Journal that it seems like Newspapers.com is missing years between 1860 and 1941; however, these issues of the Poughkeepsie Journal can actually be found under the title the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News (which is also on Newspapers.com), as the paper was going by variations of that title during those years.
The Poughkeepsie Journal was founded in 1785 was a weekly paper until 1860. It would undergo many name changes over the years, including the Country Journal, the Poughkeepsie Journal & Eagle, the Poughkeepsie Eagle, the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News, and Poughkeepsie New Yorker. The name was changed to the Poughkeepsie Journal in 1960, a return to the name it had held for a few decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
From its inception, the Poughkeepsie Journal coved state, national, and international news, and since its issues go back 230 years, that’s a lot of history you can explore! The paper also covered news specific to Dutchess County and the Mid-Hudson River Valley. So if you have ancestors from this area, the Poughkeepsie Journal is a particularly valuable resource.
You never know what you might find in the Poughkeepsie Journal. It might be a marriage or death notice for an ancestor you’ve been looking for, or photographs you’ve never seen of family members. You might even find anecdotes about your ancestors, such as this piece from 1785 about a woman who died at age 108 and maintained her good health until the end, knitting, mending clothes, and walking the 2 miles to her daughter’s house right up until her death.
Get started searching or browsing the Poughkeepsie Journal here.
The Arizona Republic began publishing in Phoenix on May 19, 1890, under the name the Arizona Republican, a title it maintained until 1930. When the paper began publishing, Arizona was not yet a state, and though Phoenix had recently become the territorial capital, it had a population of only about 3,100, with another 3,400 in surrounding areas. The young city was still relatively undeveloped, and at the time, the economy of the Phoenix depended on the Five C’s: cotton, citrus, cattle, climate, and copper.
The Republic was initially created as a partisan paper to support the administration of the unpopular Republican territorial governor, Lewis Wolfley, though he resigned from his position not long after the paper began publication. There were already two papers in Phoenix in 1890, and the Republic struggled financially at first, but by 1915 it had become the largest paper in the state. The Republic boasted full coverage of the Associated Press wires, as well as coverage of news from the rest of Arizona and the city itself.
One memorable moment from the Republic’s early years was an attempt on the editor’s life in the paper’s office by some disgruntled citizens in 1892, an incident which not only sparked articles in the paper, but also a short poem. Also memorable was the paper’s trend-setting decision in 1913 to purge from its pages all ads for patent medicines, which it considered “offensive to all decent readers.”
The Republic was there for all of Phoenix’s big moments, such as the Salt River Valley flood of 1891, the range war between the Tewksbury and Graham families (which finally ended in 1892), Arizona’s admission as the 48th state in 1912, the 1917 Bisbee Deportation (which resulted in the illegal deportation from the state of more than a thousand striking miners), the dedication of the Hoover Dam in 1935, the escape of two dozen German POWS from a Phoenix-area camp in 1944, and the first college football Fiesta Bowl in 1971.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Arizona Republic, check out its 100-page 1990 centennial issue, which covers a wide range of topics related to the paper’s history. Otherwise, get searching or browsing the paper here.
The Indianapolis Star began publication in June 1903, when Indianapolis was already a bustling city. It is a daily morning paper that originally launched with 10-page issues, except for Sunday issues, which were longer.
Indianapolis had been founded on the banks of the White River in hopes that the waterway would serve as a major artery for trade, but the river turned out to be too sandy and shallow. Nevertheless, the city became a major transportation hub for the region because of the railroads and roads that passed through it. In fact, just a few months after the Indianapolis Star began publishing, it reported on a train wreck that occurred in Indianapolis in which 14 players on the Purdue University football team were killed.
With the development of automobiles around the turn of the 20th century, Indianapolis became a major auto manufacturer. Reflecting the importance of automobiles to the city, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built in 1909, and the Indianapolis Star reported on the first Indianapolis 500 race in 1911.
In 1913, the city’s position on the White River proved a detriment when heavy rains caused massive flooding. The Indianapolis Star covered this and other natural disasters that struck the city over the years, including the outbreak of tornadoes in 2002.
Of course, the Indianapolis Star also covered politics, and a major story in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the controversial formation of Unigov—the consolidation of Indianapolis’s city and county governments.
If you have Indiana ancestors, the Indianapolis Star is a great place to look for them, as it includes plenty of columns and articles about the city’s—and region’s—inhabitants. You can find announcements of births, marriages, and deaths in addition to social and personal news. And you can learn about who held parties and meetings, as well as who played on the winning basketball team, got into a car accident, and more.
The paper is also great for discovering the context of your ancestors’ lives. For instance, from the ads, you can find out how much your family members might have paid for a TV or house during a certain era, as well as what clothing was in style at the time.
Get started searching or browsing the Indianapolis Star here—you never know who you might find!
The paper began publication in 1831 as the weekly Democratic Free Press but became the Detroit Free Press in 1837 when it transitioned to a daily paper, one of the first dailies in the state. Then, in 1853, it launched a regular Sunday edition. For the first 40 years or so, the paper was four pages, but it began expanding in 1878. During the Civil War, the paper was known for its war reporting and sent correspondents into the field to cover battles. The Detroit Free Press would later go on to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes, earning the first in 1932.
As a paper of a major Michigan city, the Detroit Free Press covered local, state, national, and eventually world news. It documented the city’s triumphs—like the Detroit Tigers’ first World Series win in 1935—as well as its struggles (such as the race riots of 1943 and 1967) and controversies (such as the Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court decision in 1974).
Detroit’s economy revolved around the auto industry throughout the 20th century, almost from the moment Henry Ford founded his Ford Motor Company in 1903 and then built the Highland Park Ford Plant in Detroit. Other automakers followed Ford, and the industry boomed in Detroit in the first half of the century. During World War II, the government used the area’s automobile factories for war materiel production, and the Detroit Free Press ran stories about Ford’s factory and others being used to build B-24 bombers, jeeps, and tanks.
In addition to the bigger stories, the Detroit Free Press also covered the milestones and other, more minor happenings in the lives of its residents, letting its readers know who died, applied for a marriage license, had an anniversary, stayed in a hotel, paid the liquor tax, was admitted to high school, needed to pick up their mail at the post office, and more.
There are countless stories of interest about the citizens of Detroit as well, including one about a woman who gave birth to her third set of twins in 1962 and one about two “plucky” Detroit women who stopped a pickpocket in 1911.
Get started searching or browsing the Detroit Free Press here. You just might find your ancestors!
Cincinnati was founded in 1788 and by 1819 had been incorporated as a city. Throughout much of the 19th century, Cincinnati was one of the biggest cities in the nation and the biggest city in the west. Due to its location on the Ohio River, it functioned as a hub for trade and shipping; it also had a huge pork industry and was sometimes referred to as “Porkopolis.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer published its first issue on April 10, 1841, and in 1848 became one of the first papers in the nation to put out a Sunday edition. Starting out at just four pages an issue, the paper steadily grew in length over the decades.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on noteworthy local events and issues of the time, covering 175 years of Ohio Valley history, in addition to national and world news. In 1884, it covered the destructive Courthouse Riots, a violent response to a manslaughter conviction that left more than 50 people dead and destroyed the Cincinnati courthouse. In 1914, the paper reported on the death of Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, at the Cincinnati Zoo. The Cincinnati Enquirer also provided in-depth coverage of the Air Canada Flight 797 accident in 1983, when a plane made an emergency landing at the Cincinnati airport and burst into flames, killing 23 passengers. Natural disasters in the area were also documented in the paper, such as the flood of 1937 and the blizzard of 1978.
If sports interest you, the Cincinnati Enquirer has countless articles about the Reds and the Bengals from over the years, including coverage of the famous “Big Red Machine” team of 1970–76, as well as articles from baseball’s early days, when Cincinnati boasted the first all-professional team in 1869.
Get started searching or browsing the Cincinnati Enquirer here. Or find other Ohio papers on Newspapers.com here. Many people ask us, “Why don’t you have this or that newspaper? Where can I get access to this newspaper archive?” Many times the answer is: We just don’t have the rights to that newspaper or the publisher still owns the rights to that paper so you will have to contact the publisher. Today we are introducing Newspapers.com Publisher Extra. Publisher Extra is a subscription that provides unique access to many newspapers’ archives that are still under copyright with editions as recent as last month. By working directly with publishers, we are now able to provide access to long runs and recent editions of some the most valuable papers out there. Even if you don’t subscribe to the Publisher Extra subscription, every Newspapers.com Basic subscriber will get access to the out-of-copyright* editions for these newly added newspapers as they become available. For more recent years you will need to upgrade to Publisher Extra. Here is a list of some of the papers available today. We are excited to offer this one-of-a-kind subscription for those who are interested in access to longer run newspaper archives that have never been available online before. If you’re a newspaper publisher and would like to know how to work with us to get your newspaper archive online, please contact us. *Newspapers.com Basic subscribers will still have access to the years up through 1922 and in some cases even up through 1963 for these newly added newspapers.
Let’s take a look a few of these papers:
Other Native American Papers on Newspapers.com include (but are not necessarily limited to):
Explore these papers and more on Newspapers.com!
Let’s take a quick look at a few of the newest papers:
If you have ancestors from northern Illinois, check out our new papers from DeKalb: the DeKalb Chronicle and the Daily Chronicle. The DeKalb Chronicle was a weekly paper that in mid-1895 switched over to a daily format and changed its name to the Daily Chronicle. Between the two papers, Newspapers.com has more than 100 years’ worth of issues.
If your relatives hail from Franklin County Missouri or areas nearby, try the St. Clair Chronicle. The St. Clair Chronicle was a weekly paper that ran for about 60 years, starting in the 1920s. Newspapers.com currently has issues from the ’20s into the ’70s.
The Age was another historically prominent Aussie paper, and Newspapers.com currently has issues as far back as 1859. In its earliest years, the paper didn’t do very well, but under the ownership of the Syme family, it became one of the most successful papers in the world in the late 19th century.
These are just a handful of the new papers on Newspapers.com. Remember to visit the New & Updated page to see the rest!
Some of the longest running black papers we have on Newspapers.com are The Pittsburgh Courier, The Washington Bee, and St. Paul-based The Appeal. Long-running newspapers such as these can be especially useful for tracking long-time residents of a city or for seeing how the community and its inhabitants changed over time. On the other hand, if you’re more interested in a specific time period that was historically significant to black history, such as the post-Civil War and Reconstruction era, you can browse through black papers like the Charleston Advocate, Maryville Republican, and Concordia Eagle.
The historical black papers on Newspapers.com cover a wide geographic area. Though many are based in the South, there are also examples from the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Wherever there was a big enough population of literate African Americans to support a black paper, one often existed (though many were short-lived), with black papers popping up in places you might not initially expect, like Montana.
Though most black papers focused on news that would interest African American readers, some were even narrower in scope, concentrating on specific topics like slavery. Two anti-slavery papers you can find on Newspapers.com are the Liberator (established by famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison) and the Anti-Slavery Bugle.
Black papers can be especially rich resources for finding information on your African American ancestors, as these papers often reported on people and events that white papers overlooked. So get started searching on Newspapers.com here.
Our newest Pennsylvania titles include Danville’s Morning News, the Montrose Democrat, Uniontown’s Evening Genius, Shippennsburg’s News-Chronicle, the Warren Mail, and a variety of papers from the city of Wilkes-Barre. Plus, more than 40 of our existing titles have been updated recently. If you have ancestors from these areas, try searching for them in these new and updated titles!
Did you know that some of the oldest papers on Newspapers.com can be found in the Pennsylvania collection? For instance, five of our Pennsylvania papers date back to the 18th century, including two that pre-date the Revolutionary War: the Pennsylvania Gazette (with issues back to 1728), Pennsylvania Packet (1771), Freeman’s Journal or North-American Intelligencer (1781), Independent Gazetteer (1782), and Die Unpartheyische York Gazette (1796). An interesting tidbit about the previously mentioned Die Unpartheyische York Gazette is that it’s a German-language paper. Other papers in the Pennsylvania collection likewise reflect the state’s immigrant heritage, like the Middleburgh Post, which in 1888 began running a popular weekly satirical column written in the Pennsylvania German dialect. Similarly, Philadelphia’s Evening Public Ledger included an Italian-language column to draw in readers from the city’s large Italian population. Another interesting paper is the Petroleum Centre Daily Record. Like its name suggests, the short-lived town of Petroleum Centre lived and breathed one industry—oil. Thus the Daily Record revolved around oil too, from its ads to its market reports to its editorials. Even its accounts of the goings-on in the lives of the inhabitants often involved the oil industry. However, because Petroleum Centre and the Daily Record were tied so closely to oil, a drop in oil prices in the early 1870s spelled the end of both the town and its paper. So if you have Pennsylvania ancestors, or are just interested in Pennsylvania history, try searching or browsing Newspapers.com‘s Pennsylvania collection. You never know what—or who—you might find! 
Posted in Content Update
The Arizona Republic
Do you have ancestors from out west? Look for them in the Arizona Republic on Newspapers.com ! With a Newspapers.com Basic subscription, you can see issues from 1890 through 1922; or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access the years previously listed and additional issues from 1923 to April 2016. 
The Indianapolis Star
If you have ancestors from Indiana or the surrounding region, come check out the Indianapolis Star on Newspapers.com. Issues from 1903 to 1922 are available with a Newspapers.com Basic subscription—or,with a Publisher Extra subscription, access the years previously listed and additional issues from 1923 to March 2016.
Posted in Content Update
The Detroit Free Press
Do you have ancestors from Detroit or surrounding areas of Michigan? Check out the Detroit Free Press on Newspapers.com. Issues from 1837 through 1922 are available with a Newspapers.com Basic subscription—or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access the years previously listed and additional issues from 1923 to February 2016.
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Do you have ancestors or other family from Ohio or northern Kentucky? Come check out the Cincinnati Enquirer, one of the new papers on Newspapers.com. Explore issues of the paper dating back to 1841, when it began publication, up through 1922—or, with a Publisher Extra subscription, access additional issues from 1923 through 2015.
And, of course, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported on the doings of the area’s residents, from marriages, to deaths, to crimes, and beyond.
Introducing Publisher Extra
Featured Newspapers with Publisher Extra Issues
– Denotes Publisher Extra years available
1923–2015)1923–2015)1923–2015)1923–2015)1923–2015)1923–2015)1923–2015)1949–2015)1964–2013)1923–2014)1923–2004)1956–2015)Native American Papers
November is Native American Heritage Month. Come explore the newspapers written by or for Native Americans on Newspapers.com. Though some of these papers may have just a few issues available, they all provide a wealth of insight into Native American life at the turn of the 19th century and beyond.
New Papers on Newspapers.com
Have you checked out our New & Updated papers page lately? It’s the best place to find out which newspapers have recently been added to our site.
Do you have ancestors who come from Australia? Then check out the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age (based in Melbourne). The issues of the Sydney Morning Herald on Newspapers.com stretch back as far as 1831, when the newspaper began publication. It began as a weekly called the Sydney Herald, but after about 10 years of publication it became a daily and the name was changed to what it is now. The Sydney Morning Herald is the continent’s oldest continuously published paper.
Black History Papers
In honor of Black History Month, we’re highlighting some of the many historical black papers that we have here on Newspapers.com. These include dozens of papers that were either black owned, were geared toward a black audience, or dealt specifically with topics relevant to African Americans. Though some of these papers may only have a few issues available, they still provide a valuable perspective on the struggles, contributions, and everyday lives of African Americans.
Some of the black papers on Newspapers.com were quite influential during their heyday. In addition to the previously mentioned Washington Bee, some of these include the Lexington Standard, Kansas City Sun, and Richmond Planet. Others were more controversial, like the Broad Ax, which was often inflammatory. Papers that are especially useful to historians today include the Sedalia Weekly Conservator (for dealing with a variety of racial issues in addition to the news) and the Seattle Republican (for covering conditions for African Americans across the nation).
Pennsylvania Papers
With over 10 million pages currently spanning more than 190 papers and 80+ cities, our Pennsylvania collection is Newspapers.com‘s largest—and it’s still growing! 
If you’re interested in the Civil War, the Clearfield Republican is definitely worth a read. Though Pennsylvania was a Union state, the Clearfield Republican (a Copperhead Democrat paper) was vehemently anti-Lincoln, anti-war, and anti-draft, so its editorials give an unusual perspective into the time period. Since the paper published lists of Civil War draftees from Clearfield Country, this paper can also be a good place to look for your male ancestors from the area.