Thanks to digitisation, newspapers from the seventeenth to the
twenty-first century have become an indispensable and accessible source
for researchers. Through their pages, historians with a passion for a
person or a place or a time or a topic can rediscover forgotten details
and gain new insights into the society and values of bygone ages.
Historical Research Using British Newspapers provides plenty of
practical advice for anyone intending to use old newspapers by:
* outlining the strengths of newspapers as source material
* revealing the drawbacks of newspapers as sources and giving ways to
guard against them
* tracing the development of the British newspaper industry
* showing the type of information that can be found in newspapers and
how it can be used
* identifying the best newspapers to start with when researching a
particular topic
* suggesting methods to locate the most relevant articles available
* demonstrating techniques for collating, analysing and interpreting
information
* showing how to place newspaper reports in their wider context
In addition nine case studies are included, showing how researchers have
already made productive use of newspapers to gain insights that were not
available from elsewhere.