If you are not familiar with newspapers.com, we have created a brief overview of how to search for and submit articles from newspapers.com to History Unfolded. All History Unfolded registrants will be able to gain free access to newspapers.com Feb 13-19, March 27-April 2, April 17-23, and May 15-21.*
To further aid classroom discoveries made through the History Unfolded project, educators can also receive free access to ‘Newspapers.com Basic’ and Holocaust discussion guides and materials year-round through AncestryClassroom. Eligible educators who are interested can learn more and apply here.
*Newspapers.com has assisted the US Holocaust Memorial Museum with History Unfolded, including by generously making its archives available to help provide newspaper collections for History Unfolded research. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is not affiliated with and does not endorse Newspapers.com or AncestryClassroom.
Before searching the newspapers.com archives, you will want to select History Unfolded event module topic(s) to research. Go to “Menu” and “Browse Events” to see what topics we are collecting research on. Please research and submit articles on these topics only. Use the event module’s “keywords” and “dates-to-check” to guide your research.
Back on the newspapers.com website, once you are on the homepage of newspapers.com, there are a few different ways you can search for articles on topic(s) you have chosen to research. Similar to other online newspaper databases, newspapers.com allows for you to search by paper title, date, keywords, or by state and city. This allows citizen historians to search for reporting on events that took place during specific time periods and narrow their searches based on geographic location or even specific newspapers. Newspapers.com provides useful information on how to navigate the database through a video explaining how to search using keywords as well as a basic introduction video.
Think you’ve found an article for the History Unfolded database? The first step is to determine whether or not the article already exists in the database. By going to the History Unfolded “Menu” and then “Explore User Research”, you can search for what we’ve already collected. After you have determined that the article has not been submitted to the database before, the process for submitting articles found at newspapers.com is very similar to any other submission. If this is your first time submitting to History Unfolded or if you need a refresher, check out this helpful link, which will be able to answer some of the questions you may have while submitting. You will need to create a History Unfolded account or log in if you already have one. To submit your findings, go to “Menu” and “Submit Research” or “My Profile” and “Submit Research”. After filling out the newspaper article’s information, such as the headline and newspaper archive from which you found the article (in this case it would be “https://www.newspapers.com”), you will be prompted to the History Unfolded’s page asking for the newspapers.com “clipping”. Normally you would upload an image or pdf like an email attachment, however, we have the unique ability to embed the newspapers.com clipping right into our database. This gives future visitors to the website the ability to read the article in a way they otherwise couldn’t, and it also helps the History Unfolded team review your submitted articles faster. To get this link, follow these steps.
- Pull up the newspapers.com web page with your article on it. In the upper right hand corner there is a “CLIP” button that has an icon of a scissors on it. Click here.
- This will bring you to a page that looks similar to the one below. If you have ever used your computer’s “snipping tool”, the process is very similar here. Simply adjust the box by dragging out the corners so that your entire article is within the clipping box. You can also drag the box by clicking and dragging it.
- Once you have your article completely in the box, click the blue “CLIP” button. This will bring up a page that says “Article has been clipped!”. On this page, click on the far right button that says “EMBED”. This will bring up two web page links. The link or clipping we need at History Unfolded is the first one, which has the word “Embed” next to it. Simply copy this link and paste it into the box back on the History Unfolded submission page.
Through newspapers.com research, we hope to not only expand our database, but also work towards our goal of developing a more representative sample of newspaper reporting in each of the fifty states. If you wish to help with this specific research challenge, please reach out to the History Unfolded’s community manager here.
As always, we thank you for your continued support for this project. We quite literally could not do it without your help!
