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Adding 220,681 pages this week brings us tantalisingly close to 90 million pages in the Archive—another milestone on our journey to 100 million pages. To reach this, we’ve welcomed three new titles and expanded fifty-three existing ones.While we always enjoy adding new titles (and more on those in a moment), one of the most rewarding, and often intricate, tasks is adding new material to existing publications. Expanding coverage by tracking down ‘missing years’ requires careful investigation by our scanning team. Once a…

This week 282,566 pages have joined the archives from ten Titles. We have added one new title and augmented our holdings of a further nine titles extending coverage from the 1810s and 1990s.New to the Archive this week is the Folkestone Daily News 1910-1914. The title, which shows evidence of extensive handling before being microfilmed and subsequently digitised, joins three other Folkestone titles in the Archive. The four titles combined cover the history of the harbour town from 1855 to 1999.In our…

Here at The Archive, we love to learn of the discoveries you have made through our newspaper pages, and how you have used them, whether they have influenced novels, or provided information for dissertations. We were incredibly grateful, therefore, when crime writer and athletics historian Peter Lovesey contacted us with his account of sixty years of researching newspapers. From accessing historical newspapers in their original form, to scrolling through microfilm reels, and finally to searching newspapers digitally on the British…

We’ve added 153,774 pages to 10 regional titles to The Archive this week. We have added seventy-five years worth of material from between 1911 and 2003. Our additions focus on augmenting existing titles including the West Lancashire Evening Gazette which we first added in September of this year, and the Sussex Express which we first added to in 2013.The Sussex Express which first joined The Archive in 2013 has undergone many title changes. In 1857 it was The Sussex Agricultural Express, but as it masthead showed…

Merseyside-born, Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Dod, is the youngest ever winner of the Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championship, achieving her triumph in 1887 at the tender age of 15 years and 285 days.She won the singles title a remarkable five times in total, between the years 1887 and 1893.An article in the Sheffield Independent chronicles Lottie’s first ever Wimbledon victory in 1887.About the ladies’ singles there is little to be said – only five entered as against eight last year. Miss Lottie Dod simply “cantered” through the…

In this special guest blog, David Musgrove, content director for BBC History Magazine and HistoryExtra, considers the amazing life of the now-forgotten Victorian showman, athlete, and wheelbarrow pedestrian Bob Carlisle, and how his clever manipulation of newspapers marks him out as a 19th-century influencer.Did the Victorian period have influencers? Yes, but rather than using social media and camera phones, they employed letter-writing and wheelbarrows.I’ve been researching the story of a forgotten 19th-century minor celebrity whose life was widely…

At The Archive we are delighted to welcome guest blogs from our users, which highlight a wealth of different research interests. This month, we are excited to feature a blog on researching queer history by Staffordshire researcher Rebecca Morris-Quinn.My name is Rebecca, I am a queer woman living in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. I’ve been interested in genealogy and history for many years, since I found out that I share a birthday with a great-great aunt, Olive (albeit over 100 years ago).…

At the British Newspaper Archive we are always delighted to hear how The Archive has been used to inform a range of different research interests. In this very special guest blog, Sidonia Serafini of Georgia College & State University and Barbara McCaskill of the University of Georgia take a look at the work of the Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Birmingham’s first Black minister, as reported in the British press, through the newspapers to be found in our collection.In March 1883, Reverend…

This week at The Archive we are delighted to have reached another landmark, having passed 59 million pages in total over the past seven days alone. We have added 312,002 brand new pages, with a trio of exciting specialist titles joining us, one of which covers in illustrated detail the First World War, as well as adding a range of new titles from across England and Scotland, from Carluke to Chester, from Bolton to Nottingham. We’ve also updated 82 of our existing titles…

As part of our railway history month on The Archive, we’re delighted to welcome a very special guest blog post from Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth and co-lead of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death Project.’ In this special blog, Mike takes a look at the dark side of railway work, and how the British Newspaper Archive has helped to inform research into railway accidents from days past.The Dark Side of Railway Work…