• When a database has Advanced Search options, try using those to refine your search.
• Since historical newspaper and periodical databases cover many decades, it is often a helpful to limit your search to a specific date range, such as 1890-1910.
• Think about what terms that might have been used to in articles about your topic during the time period. For example, if you were looking for news articles about people leaving to tour Europe, you might try searching for a phrase like "Grand Tour." Or, when searching for sources on etiquette, you would likely search for the term etiquette, but you might also want to experiment with a alternative terms, such as manners.
• Historical newspaper and periodical databases often sort results in chronological order. It might be helpful to sort by relevance/best matches first.
New York Times Historical (1851-2003)
Historical Newspapers from the Boston Public Library With a BPL eCard, you can search:
American Periodical Series Popular publications from 1740 to 1940, including special interest & general magazines, literary & professional journals, children's & women's magazines & many other historically-significant periodicals.
You can find many primary sources freely available online. Here are just a few examples:
Making of America - University of Michigan Library and Making of America - Cornell University Library Digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
Google News Archive Use the Advanced Search to limit by date. Some of the articles will be freely available online. If you see an article with a fee--don't pay it! We may have access to the article online (this will be the case with any New York Times article), or we can track down a copy of the article for you some other way.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
Nineteenth Century Collections Online Includes a variety of material types--monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more. Includes several collections, including "Women: Transnational Networks" which provides a number of etiquette manuals. Try using Advanced Search to limit by date and to monograph under Content Type.
Digitized Dance and Etiquette Manuals from the Library of Congress (1490-1910)
Internet Archive Includes many digitized historical collections, including a variety of books and historical texts.
NINES Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) 19th century archives and research about 19th century.
Women Working Digitized materials from Harvard. Try searching the collection for a term such as etiquette. Your search results will be sorted by date so that you can easily locate sources from the desired time period, such as Good Manners for All Occasions: A Practical Manual (1904).
Making of America - University of Michigan and Making of America - Cornell University
Google Books Advanced Search Limit content to Magazines. To limit only to freely available content, select “Full view only” for Search. You can also limit to a specific date range.
Travel Writing, Spectacle and World History (1818-1970s) Women's travel diaries and correspondence, along with photographs, postcards & ephemera. Includes diaries of women traveling in Europe at the turn of the century.