How can newspapers help us learn about the past?

Holly: Read all about it. Read all about it. Incredibly well dressed, historian, hands out newspapers on the street. Read all about it.

Today, most of us hear about the news with much more immediacy. But not so long ago, national newspapers were the main way that people heard about events from across the country and around the world.

Back in the Victorian era, you might have seen newspaper sellers on street corners.

There's also these, local newspapers, which would keep us up to date with events much closer to home.

Newspapers are an amazing way to look at a moment in time, but do they tell the whole story?

Now, you'd think if you wanted to research a topic from the past, you could just pull up a newspaper article from the archive and you'd have the whole story.

But that's not quite right, the news is more of a clue than the full picture.

We really need to put on our detective hat and find out who wrote the article, where they got the information from, and how reliable is that information.

We can do this by checking other sources for the same story, eyewitness accounts, photographs, even other articles, and using these to build together a full picture of events, not just what the journalist or the newspaper owner wanted you to think.

We also need to think about how the newspapers of the past reflect the values, interests, and opinions of the time, which may be completely different to how we see things today.

Let's look at some real headlines and see what's behind them.

First up, this article from National Newspaper, The Daily Mirror in 1939.

Now, during the Second World War, parents were advised to send their children to live in the countryside, often with absolute strangers in order to keep them safe from bombing raids in the big cities.

‘And they did smile! A teacher cheerly told a father, “We'll be back in a week. The weather's glorious for a nice holiday.” Organisation was so good that a quarter of an hour after the assembly, the children were ready to move. Not one of the 250 children was late at Mandeville Street School, Lower Clapton. Once inside their buses, they talked happily with their parents through the windows. “Got your comics, Bert?” shouted a fond father. Bert had them all right, with his gas mask. The evacuation went off with remarkable smoothness.’

Wow, the evacuations sound like they were great fun and that everyone was excited to have a holiday in the countryside. It turns out there are quite a lot of other sources that show that we are not getting the full picture of this event.

Later on, evacuees reported, and letters from children showed, that a lot of them were very distressed by the separation from their parents. They may have been safe from the bombings, but the evacuations were definitely not a holiday. Lots of doctors’ inspections also showed that many evacuees were not getting enough to eat, which embarrassed the government at the time and showed that these cheerful articles may not have been the whole truth.

This headline falls under ‘wartime propaganda’, and what that means is that the newspapers had to follow government guidelines on what they could print. This meant they had to print happy stories and leave out the bad news.

And what this means for us as historians is we have to dig a little deeper to uncover the truth. Newspapers are hugely valuable sources of information that can help us see into the past.

I'd love to know what newspaper articles you can find about your town from a hundred years ago. What are the pictures or documents or eyewitness accounts you can find to back up that story?

It's up to you to uncover History Clue Crew!