Mid-Term Assignment
In addition to Google, Google Images, Google News, and Google News Archive, there are several library resources that you might find useful for this assignment.
Although you can use the Internet to find a vast range of documents (newspaper articles, magazine articles, letters, photographs, documentaries, &c), from just about every conceivable historical era, it’s important to understand that documents created before 1995 were probably not distributed through the World Wide Web. It’s more likely they were sent through the mail, sold at a newsstand, distributed freely at a street corner, broadcast over a television network, and so forth.
Google sometimes makes it difficult to understand the differences between kinds of publications–differences that would often have been more obvious to a contemporary reader. For example, one probably wouldn’t have picked up the Berkeley Barb in the same sorts of places as the the Los Angeles Times. For this assignment, you will need to understand what distinguishes different kinds of publications, and library resources can make it easier to do so.
Finally, when using Google, it can be difficult to sift different points of view, since Google organizes search results by relevance, not by criteria like place of publication, circulation size, intended audience, or political orientation. This article, Confrontation at Nahr-El-Bared, from the publication Free Palestine (October, 1969, p.6), would be even harder to find through Google, since it hasn’t yet been digitized, and even if it had been, you might spend a lot of time sifting through more “popular” articles before uncovering it.
Newspapers
The best place to begin finding newspapers in the Library is our guide to Finding Newspapers. This guide includes information on finding newspaper articles in all formats (more than just online!), as well as a section on the Alternative Press.
Magazines
Reader’s Guide Retrospective. Identifies articles from popular magazines through 1982. Most of these articles will be from magazines that have not yet been digitized, so you’ll need to use the Library’s Online Catalog to locate the magazines.
Academic Search Premier. Access to journals and magazines, 1984-present.
The Nation. Online version (1865-present) of the influential, liberal newsweekly.
The Economist. Online version (1843-2003) of the influential, British newsweekly.
Other Sources
Israel National Photo Archives.
Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archives.
American History in Video. The title of this collection is a little misleading, as it includes dozens of newsreels on events in world history, including Israel.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive.
The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narrative, 1960-1974. The focus of this collection is the United States, but it includes significant coverage of Israel.
ArtStor. Large collection of images, including photojournalism.