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This week at The Archive we have been busy adding an incredible 167,444 brand new pages to our collection, with nineteen new titles added in all. And this week’s new titles have an especially Scottish theme, with a lucky thirteen new titles added from Scotland alone over the past seven days.Meanwhile, we have added six historic London titles, digitised as part of the British Library’s Heritage Made Digital programme, and updated fifteen of our existing newspaper titles, including pages from…

Nowadays, we tend to think of Halloween as a thoroughly modern phenomenon, an American Hallmark holiday. But using newspapers from the Victorian era, accessed through The Archive, we will discover in this blog how Halloween is a thoroughly ancient phenomenon.We will look at the ancient origins of the October festival, and explore its traditions, some of which have lasted through to this day, like bobbing for apples, and others that have fallen by the wayside, for example the day’s…

With spooky season now upon us, we thought we’d scour the pages of The Archive to find some of the most spine-chilling ghost stories ever published in our newspapers.So settle in and prepare to be scared by tales of ghostly armies, inexplicable apparitions and portents from the afterlife, all of which have been featured in the pages of the newspapers to be found on The Archive.Want to learn more? Register now and explore The Archive1. An Army of…

This week at The Archive we are delighted to announce that we now have 42 million pages available to search, with our current total having hit 42,089,096 pages.In this last week alone we have added 112,706 brand new pages, with seven brand new titles joining us from England and from Wales. In all, we have added 161 years’ worth of headlines. Read on to discover the treats we have in store for you – from new titles from the West Country, to a day…

On Christmas Day 1906 the city of Sheffield in the north of England saw the ‘heaviest Christmas snow for 25 years,’ as the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reports:On the evening of Christmas Day the snow began to fall, and yesterday morning the city was covered in a beautiful mantle of the purest white. Snow lay on the ground to the depth of about six inches, and, except in the streets, so remained until last night, when there was a further fall.Long…

In 1928, novelist Radclyffe Hall published her seminal LGBTQ work The Well of Loneliness. Following the story of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class woman who finds love with one Mary Llewellyn and is consequently shunned by society, the work was groundbreaking in its lesbian subject matter.Radclyffe Hall | Graphic | 30 April 1927Although it was received favourably by many publications including the Daily Herald and Lady’s Pictorial, Sunday Express editor James Douglas began a campaign on 18 August 1928 to have Hall’s book banned – naming The…

Here at The Archive this week we have released 73,928 brand new pages – and we are delighted to welcome three brand new titles to our ever-expanding collection, covering three different countries and nearly a century of news.Register now and explore the ArchiveOur first new title this week is for the West Yorkshire town of Halifax. Described as a ‘reputable provincial newspaper,’ the Halifax Guardian began life in 1832 as the Halifax Guardian and Huddersfield and Bradford Advertiser. The preferred local…

The Rev Patrick Brontë of Thornton, has been nominated to the Perpetual Curacy of Haworth, in the parish of Bradford, and has been licenced to the same by his Grace the Archbishop of York.Manchester Mercury | 14 March 1820This rather innocuous announcement appeared in the pages of the Manchester Mercury on the 14 March 1820. At the time, it would have been considered fairly run-of-the-mill: a typical clergy appointment. But 200 years later, these short sentences conjure up a wave of brilliant associations concerning…

As Britannia & Eve relates, ‘In 1586 a young genius of twenty-two, already the father of twins, packed his bags, said good-bye to the fading charms of his older wife, and quitted his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to earn his living in London as an actor.’This young genius was of course none other than William Shakespeare, about whose life precious little is known. But we do know that it was to London that the bard went, Dick Whittington-like, to pursue his fortune.…

THROUGH thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle;Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;In thy once smiling garden the hemlock and thistleHave choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way.So wrote the poet Lord Byron, inspired by his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. Using pages from the British Newspaper Archive, this blog will explore Byron’s affinity with the ancient building, and how Newstead Abbey beat the odds to survive until the…