The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000: A “Must-have”

Provide multi-disciplinary research with a fully-searchable digital archive of what was once the world’s largest selling newspaper. The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 provides a fascinating picture of politics, society, and culture through approximately one million pages of the newspaper’s backfile. Offering a balance of personal interest stories alongside incisive analysis, The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 delivers a fascinating glimpse into daily life as it was experienced over the past 150 years.

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Binge-worthy Primary Sources You’ll Love

The public library is a place for creativity and innovation, a place for civil discourse and debate, a place for dialogue, and conversation. It’s where diverse groups of people can pursue curiosity.

Be the top-of-mind resource for all of your patrons’ discovery needs and empower learning and discovery.

Better support your patron’s curiosity about LGBTQ history and activism, nineteenth-century America, and American prose fiction from 1774-1920 with one-time purchase archives.

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New Smithsonian Primary Sources in U.S. History: Lively, First Person, and Real

Posted on May 26, 2016

Primary sources have been called snippets of history – small windows that show a picture of one moment in time. A letter, a memoir, a personal account – each provides a unique, often personal perspective. And when they are put together in a meaningful way, they create a full and rich picture of historical events, people, and developments while supporting national learning standards.

By directly engaging with artifacts and individual records, students can explore, analyze, and delve more deeply into a topic.  In addition, primary sources help students:

  • Develop critical thinking skills by examining meaning, context, bias, purpose, point of view, and more.
  • Pursue independent learning as they construct knowledge by interacting with sources that represent different accounts of the same event/topic.
  • Understand how viewpoints and biases affect interpretation of history.

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Discovering History Through Digital Newspaper Collections

Posted on March 2, 2016

By Seth Cayley

Can cocaine really cure sea-sickness? Something tells me that very little peer-reviewed research has been done on the subject in recent years. But that didn’t stop the Victorians. From around 1870-1915 a large number of narcotics, including heroin, were widely and legally available, and often packaged as medicines. Historians have dubbed this period before the first international drug control treaties as “The Great Binge”.

I first came across The Great Binge when browsing through bound volumes of the Illustrated London News for the first time at university. While I was supposed to be looking for news items about pre-First World War Europe, my eyes kept on being drawn to the adverts. Leafing through these, I learnt that: smoking Joy’s cigarettes could help with bronchitis; a certain brand of men’s underwear does not shrink; and that an electric hairbrush could cure my “nervous headache” (although I was pretty certain my headache that day had other causes common to students).

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