Historical Research Using British Newspapers

Thanks to digitisation, newspapers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century have become an indispensable and accessible source for researchers. Through their pages, historians with a passion for a person or a place or a time or a topic can rediscover forgotten details and gain new insights into the society and values of bygone ages.

Historical Research Using British Newspapers provides plenty of practical advice for anyone intending to use old newspapers by:

* outlining the strengths of newspapers as source material

* revealing the drawbacks of newspapers as sources and giving ways to guard against them

* tracing the development of the British newspaper industry

* showing the type of information that can be found in newspapers and how it can be used

* identifying the best newspapers to start with when researching a particular topic

* suggesting methods to locate the most relevant articles available

* demonstrating techniques for collating, analysing and interpreting information

* showing how to place newspaper reports in their wider context

In addition nine case studies are included, showing how researchers have already made productive use of newspapers to gain insights that were not available from elsewhere.

Historian and writer Denise Bates used old newspapers extensively when researching her first two books, Pit Lasses and Breach of Promise to Marry and the new information she discovered added greatly to the existing knowledge about both subjects. Historical Research Using British Newspapers draws on her extensive practical experience of using old newspapers as source material.