Searching for historical newspaper accounts is a difficult and time-consuming process . However, there are some print and online sources that may be useful.
Remember that after mining the NAACP Lynching Records at Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama for data, the project coordinators of the Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project searched “period newspapers, county histories, academic theses, published works, and any other credible nonfiction source in order to develop a list of individual incidents of lynching.”
Here are some starting points for your research using these kinds of materials:
Published Works. Use Cruzcat and Melvyl to locate monographs, bibliographies and source material related to lynching. These can be valuable for identifying historical regional newspapers and other arcane sources used to compile the content of the book.
Periodical Indexes and Collections of Online Full-Text Articles.
America History and Life (e.g. subject=lynching) :
Historical coverage of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. Contains citations and abstracts for articles, book and media reviews, and dissertations. The database also includes CLIO Notes, which guides the user through chronologies and brief summaries of significant events and themes in American history.
Subject area(s): ['Humanities', 'Social Sciences']. Covers: Articles written 1964 - present.
JSTOR (e.g. search for “lynching” and limit to African American journals.) :
A searchable database containing the full-text of back issues of more than 160 academic journals. Subject area(s): ['Humanities', 'Science and Engineering', 'Social Sciences']. Coverage: Archival. Latest three years are not available.
Project Muse:
This searchable database contains online access to the full-text of over 100 scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.
Subject area(s): ['Art and Art History', 'Humanities', 'Science and Engineering', 'Social Sciences']. Coverage varies.
Digital Dissertations (e.g. keyword=lynching and subject=history, united states)
Citations for U.S. dissertations and masters theses. Abstracts are included for all entries published since 1980. Full-text for all University of California dissertations issued since 1997 is available in pdf format.
Subject area(s): ['Art and Art History', 'Humanities', 'Science and Engineering', 'Social Sciences']. Covers: 1861 - present
State and County Historical Newspaper Collections:
A number of state and county historical associations and libraries have created online indexes to historical newspapers. Search Google for “historic or historical newspapers” and look for state or county sites.
If you can identify a newspaper account, you can order a copy of it through Interlibrary Loan in our library.
Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File - UCB NewsMicro MICROFILM 19252 E NEWS
Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File. Guide - McH Ref E185.6.K57. This is the guide to the collection above, which can be borrowed through our Interlibrary Loan Department, reel by reel from UCB.
In addition to using all of the resources above, it is often very useful to conduct Internet searches using your favorite search engine.
Googling Michael J. Pfeifer, author of Rough Justice and “lynching” e.g., will turn up a piece entitled “Lynching and Criminal Justice: The Midwest and the West as American Regions, 1878-1920." In the notes at the end of the article, he cites a number of primary and secondary sources, including historic newspapers that could be a clue for further searching.
