06.19.2009 4:00 pm
First-hand history: British Library puts archives of 19th-century newspapers online
Post-Dispatch Classical Music
Newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries were a lot more colorful than their modern descendants in some ways (fairness? what’s that?), and there were a lot more of them.
Now history buffs and Anglophiles can gain access to two million pages from 49 British newspapers of 19th and 20th century, including everything from the Napoleonic Wars to Jack the Ripper, from the Great War to assorted sex scandals. It’s all thanks to the British Library.
The one caveat: access to most of it will cost you. Some of it, however, is free, and it’s worth a look, if only for a taste of a kind of florid journalistic prose that would make modern copy editors faint before their monitors. Check it out: http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/
