Writers

NewspaperARCHIVE.com can be a surprisingly rich source of inspiration for you as a writer. You can gather context for a historical article or a memoir and remind yourself of what it was like back then, in preparation for writing. Doing a search on a particular historical figure may turn up details that didn't make it into the popular books on the subject.

Plus, when you research a particular event or person in a newspaper, you get a lot of detail about events that were co-occurring. For example, next to an article about Iwo Jima there may be an article about rationing, or war bonds, or a movie ad about Casablanca, or a campaign by the boy scouts to gather up scrap metal.

All of those added up to create the gestalt or overall experience at that time, and when you look at them all together you gain a lot of background or atmospheric detail that may help you in recreating the experience that your fictional character or your actual relative or even you went through at that time.

We invite you to submit stories that you have created using these archives. If you want to include references to particular newspaper images in your article, simply note the image id of the page in a parenthesis where you would like it to go like this (image id# 114310118) and we'll make the link for you if and when we publish your story online.