"Speaking of the internet, I must be terrible with search engines. There must be a few sights that show old newspaper articles. I’m interested in “contemporary accounts” and the best site I’ve been able to find is the New York Times’ “This Day In History”.
That's probably as good as you are going to get on a search engine, for free and not leaving the house. You could try Harper's Magazine site (sorry, can't give you the link, but you could search it!), they go back over 100 years and it would be interesting to see if they reveal or hide their old issues, some of which are tremendously politically incorrect by today's standard. FWIW I think they were anti-slavery, but also very, extremely anti-Catholic. For the full editions of the old NY Times, etc. I'm pretty sure you'd have to go to the library and get the microfilm out. I say this based on trying to help my daughter with her research paper. With her college ID she can access the school's library from anywhere, you can get into an amazing amount of stuff, even Lexis/Nexus but you can't get much from the Times, just an abstract. She was stumped, but I said, I think you need to go to the microfilm.
We'll see how that assignment works out in the end. Happy surfing through history!
Thank you. I tried Harper's, could have sworn it worked a few years ago, but now I don't see any links to their (truly historic) archives.
Once at the library I found several bound volumes of Harpers from the Civil War era. Fantastic. Hours of great reading, contradicting my history teachers.
I guess I've been holding out hope that such material would eventually be available to me at home. Surely someday.