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This week we have added an icon of British teenage life to our Archive, DC Thomson’s best-selling teen magazine, none other than Jackie. A weekly magazine for girls, Jackie was a cultural phenomenon.We’ve published every single edition of Jackie here at The Archive, running from 1964 through to 1993. That means we’ve added 51,474 pages of purely Jackie this week, a lively and bright smorgasbord of everything that appealed to a young teenage girl in the latter half of the twentieth century.…

1889 was the year of the Cleveland Street scandal, in which a male brothel was raided in Cleveland Street, in London’s West End. At the time, sexual acts between men were illegal in Britain, and those who visited the house of assignation on Cleveland Street faced prosecution. However, due to the high social standing of many of the clientele of 19 Cleveland Street, only a few men faced prison time, as the British government were accused of covering up the scandal in…

June is Pride Month. At The Archive, we are delving into the newspapers and pulling out the breadth of LGBTQ history available.Register now and explore The Archive18th Century Gay Subculture18th century London was home to a flourishing gay subculture with Molly Houses at the centre of the social scene. ‘Molly’ was a slur used for effeminate, homosexual men and the term was adopted to describe the clubs, taverns, inns, or coffee houses where they met up in…

One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…