Newspapers and Periodicals in Historical Research

Abstract

Among the first questions which any student of history needs to ask of his or her source material are: who wrote it? when? and why? These questions pose immediate problems for the reader of any newspaper or periodical article, for the answers are neither obvious nor easily discovered. Yet the content of the press can only be interpreted with confidence once answers, however inadequate, have been found. In this essay, I should like to exemplify the problems and go some way towards answering these three basic questions, by discussing nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical literature in general but with special reference to the periodical literature of radicalism and freethought with which I am most familiar. I shall then go on to discuss examples of some general problems in the use of newspaper and periodical content.