Educational Resources

• It’s helpful to know which newspapers are available so you know what information you can expect to find. Not every newspaper or even every city or county in Ohio is represented on Chronicling America or Ohio Memory. Not every time period is represented either. To see what Ohio newspapers are currently available, click here.
• Take advantage of search limits such as state, newspaper title and date. Using these limits can help you eliminate results that are irrelevant to your search.
• Use Advanced Search options to ask the search engine to look for your search terms in different ways. Here are a few examples:
  • “Any of the words”: Type (without the brackets) <dog cat> to retrieve any page with the word dog, cat or both words.
  • “All of the words”: Type (without the brackets) <dog cat> to retrieve any page on which only both words appear.
  • “Phrase“/”Exact Phrase“: Type (without the brackets) <”dog cat“> to retrieve pages on which the words appear exactly as you have typed them. This is helpful for looking for specific quotations, sayings, place names or people names.
  • Proximity Search: Search for words within 5, 10, 50 or 100 words of one another. Use this to find information about a specific person, place or event. [Only on Chronicling America.]
  • “None of the words”: Type (without the brackets) <dog> to eliminate any search results on which the word dog appears. [Only on Ohio Memory.]
• When selecting your search terms, be sure to use contemporary vocabulary! The words we use today to describe the people, places and events of the past are not always the same as the words that people living at that time – those people reading and writing the news – would have used. For example, the country we know today as  Thailand was called Siam until 1939. If you did a search for <Thailand> in Chronicling America (which contains only newspapers published before 1923), you would get few or no relevant results. Use the search term <Siam> to get the results you want.

For more information and a step-by-step guide to searching Chronicling America, click the button below.

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In collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio staff developed a series of 11 video podcasts demonstrating how to use Chronicling America. For more information and to access the videos, click the button below.

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In collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio staff at the Ohio Historical Society have developed a series of video tutorials that will teach you advanced search strategies for Chronicling America. These videos highlight interesting topics in Chronicling America and build on the search skills that were demonstrated in the Using Chronicling America Podcast Series. The videos are available through the Ohio Historical Society’s YouTube Channel. For more information and to access the videos, click the button below.

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For additional search tips, check out our collection of subject guides.  These were developed by the National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio to introduce you to topics that were widely reported on by the Ohio press of the time. Modeled after Chronicling America‘s Recommended Topics (created and maintained by the Library of Congress), each guide provides a list of significant dates, search tips and strategies as well as links to sample articles. This is also a great way to browse historical newspapers if you don’t have a particular search topic in mind.

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Click the buttons below to learn more about the Ohio newspapers that have been digitized for Chronicling America and to browse them online. (Note: The links open as PDF documents for easy saving and printing.)

Northwest Ohio Northeast Ohio Central Ohio Southwest Ohio Southeast Ohio