January, 2012 | The British Newspaper Archive Blog

Blog

New Features

Our web team has been working hard to add extra features to the newspaper archive website. Highlighting Your Search Words in the Newspaper Article One of these new features is highlighting the first 10 occurrences of your search phrase within the article. So, for example, if your search is ’Charge of the Light Brigade‘, the words ’Charge‘, ’Light and ’Brigade‘ will be highlighted in light blue (small words like ’the‘ and ’a‘ are not included), thereby helping you to read

Continue Reading

Tags

‘Stargazing’ in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Many members of the British Newspaper Archive Team are obsessively following the Brian Cox ‘Stargazing’ programme that’s running on BBC2 at the moment. Suitably inspired by the ‘Muse of Starstruckness’, we went looking in the newspaper archive for historical stories about discoveries in astronomy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. And what was the result of our searches? Well, there appear to be as many stories in the archive about astronomical discoveries are there are stars in the sky. Well,

Continue Reading

Tags

Captain Scott and the ‘Terra Nova Expedition’ of 1912 – a Gallery of Stories

It’s exactly 100 years since Captain Robert Scott and his comrades started their ill-fated return journey to the ‘Terra Nova’, after reaching the South Pole. To mark the centenary of this historic episode, we’ve created a gallery of old newspaper stories that look at the tragedy from various viewpoints. To read these stories, just go to our Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/TheBritishNewspaperArchive

Tags

Charles Dickens and ‘Grip’ – a Raven Good and True

With so many excellent TV programmes, newspaper/magazine articles and new biographies about the life and art of Charles Dickens, it can sometimes be difficult to think up a new angle to study the life of Boz from. Luckily, the British Newspaper Archive contains 100s of stories about Charles Dickens – ranging from reviews of his novels and his reading tours to his love for ‘Grip’, his talkative and clownish pet raven (and muse for the raven in ‘Barnaby Rudge’). So

Continue Reading

Tags

AG Bell’s Demo of the Telephone to Queen Victoria and the Solving of the ‘Longitude Question’

though not both things in the one telephone call, just in case you’re wondering… We’ve found some interesting techie and scientific stories in the British Newspaper Archive over the last week, which we’ve posted on our Facebook page. The first story is rather amusing (and a touch surreal), and reports on the demo of the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell gave to Queen Victoria at Osborne House in 1878. Especially interesting is the musical pieces that were played down the

Continue Reading

Tags

‘Who Do You Think You Are? Live’ – London, 24 to 26 February 2012

Members of the British Newspaper Archive Team will be attending the ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Show at the Olympia Centre in London, from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 February 2012. The biggest family history event in the world, we will be attending ‘WDYTYA Live’ to give demos of the newspaper archive website, and also to help people who are looking to trace their ancestors using archive websites. Once we know the number of the stand and our location

Continue Reading

Tags

Hogmanay and New Year Stories from the British Newspaper Archive

To celebrate the arrival of 2012, we’ve posted some Hogmanay and Ne’erday stories from the newspaper archive on our Facebook page. Starting with a famous emancipation proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, this story gallery also contains reports on Ne’erday football matches, pension-celebrating ‘pensioners’, the Commonwealth Inauguration Ceremony of Australia, an act that finally allowed seats to be placed in UK shops(?!), the grand opening of the Manchester Ship Canal and Thomas Edison’s demo of electric lights. We’ve also looked at famous

Continue Reading

Tags