Research Guides: HIS262H5: What is Canada?: Primary Sources

How to Find Newspaper Articles in LibrarySearch

Several platforms offer access to historical newspapers. To identify which platforms would meet your needs, LibrarySearch's Newspaper page could be helpful.

LibrarySearch ➤ ➤ Newspapers
How to Find Newspaper Articles in LibrarySearch
NOTE: Even when you see "No Online Access," click the title of the newspaper article. Contradictory to the message, you will see electronic options there.

Renowned Historical Newspapers - Canada [ProQuest]

Local Newspapers - Canada

Newspapers [Library and Archives Canada]
Newspaper Archive Canadian Collection, 1840—
This collection contains the archives of over 500 Canadian newspapers, such as Winnipeg Free Press, Lethbridge Herald, Brandon Sun, and Kingston Daily British Whig.

Historical Newspapers by Province

Ontario
— Ontario Community Newspapers Portal [The OurOntario.ca - OurDigitalWorld]
— INK [the list is available here].
The coverage among the communities varies, but can include:
‣ News article indexing,
‣ Births, Marriages and Deaths (BMD) indexing, and clippings
‣ Full page/issue access
British Columbia
— The BC Historical Newspapers [University of British Columbia Library]
Features digitized versions of historical papers from around the province. The titles, which range from the Abbotsford Post to the Ymir Mirror, date from 1859 to 1995.
— The British Colonist [University of Victoria]
The collection contains all the issues of The British Colonist (also called The Daily British Colonist, The Daily Colonist, and other variants) from its first issue in 1858 to December 1950.
— The Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive
‣ The Vanderhoof Herald: 1917-1920
‣ Nechako Chronicle: 1920-1983
‣ Omineca Express: 1982-1989 and 1991-2007
— Prince George Digital Newspaper Collection [Prince George Public Library]
— Eleanor Muehle Newspaper Archive [BC History Digitization Program]
— Qiesnel Cariboo Observer [Quesnel and District Museum and Archives]
The Cariboo Observer began publication on August 29th 1908 in Quesnel, B.C., serving the communities of Ashcroft, Quesnel and Barkerville.
Alberta
— Peel's Prairie Provinces [University of Alberta]
➤ ➤ New Peel's Prairie Provinces site
➤ ➤ Original Peel's Prairie Provinces site
— Early Alberta Newspapers [University of Calgary Libraries]
Saskatchewan
— Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online (SHNO) [Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan]
The project when completed will see the digitization of newspapers from all across Saskatchewan from 1878 through to the mid 1960s.
Manitoba
— UM Digital Collections - Manitoba - Newspapers [University of Manitoba Libraries]
includes Manitoba Free Press, Winnipeg Daily Sun, Le Manitoba, etc.
Québec
— Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
This collection gives access to the following newspapers: L'Action catholique, Le Canada, Le Canadien, Le Courrier de St-Hyacinthe, Le Devoir, L'Étoile du Nord, La Minerve, La Patrie, La Presse, Le Petit journal and Le Soleil.
— Le Devoir, 1902—1998 [Google]
New Brunswick
The University of New Brunswick Libraries indexes the newspapers and includes the link to Canadiana by CRKN and Google News Archive when digitized newspapers are available.
Nova Scotia
— Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers [Province of Nova Scotia]
The site offers sixteen different newspapers published in eight very different Nova Scotia communities over a span of 230 years — from The Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser in 1769, to Le Courrier de la Nouvelle-Écosse in 2002.
Newfoundland and Labrador
— Newfoundland Newspapers [Memorial University of Newfoundland - Digital Archives Initiative]

Newspapers that focus on specific areas of studies:

Connecting Canadians: Canada’s Multicultural Newspapers
The collection includes Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, and Lithuanian newspapers.
Multicultural Canada [Simon Fraser University Library]
— Chinese Times Newspaper
— SFU Digitized Newspapers (other than the Chinese Times)
— SFU Digitized Collections
Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War
The English-language clippings are from the archive of the century-old Hamilton Spectator newspaper, while the French-language materials are from a collection of the newspaper Le Devoir.

★ Also check the Historical Canadian Newspapers Online guide, offered by Bowling Green State University Library, Ohio.

☆ Canada's Traditional News Media Sector is in Crisis ☆

A team of Toronto Metropolitan University and University of British Columbia researchers have started tracking "what is happening to local newspapers, broadcast outlets and online/digital news sources in communities across Canada" since 2008, using "the Local News Map" that consists of cloud-sourced data. Their Local News Research Project reports the serious issue that the news industry is facing. For example, their report on December 3, 2024 notes:

Between 2008 and December 3, 2024, 526 local news outlets closed in 347 communities across Canada. Of those:
- 400 closings or 76 per cent of the total were community newspapers, which publish fewer than five times per week.
- 111 were local community newspapers that closed after they were merged with other newspapers to produce regional publications.

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Newspapers, News Reports & Other Periodicals Databases

Canadiana Online
— The Serials collection includes a wide range of dailies, weeklies, specialized journals and mass-market magazines, as well as city directories and annual reports from churches, schools, and corporations.
Serials contains annuals up to 1900, periodicals up to 1920 and newspapers up to 1930.
Paper of Record
A considerable number of Canadian newspapers largely from the 19th & early 20th centuries are also included.
America's Historical Newspapers
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
[Library of Congress] You can also use https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/.
America's historic newspaper pages from 1777–1963 are available.
The U.S. Newspaper Directory is also useful to find information about American newspapers published between 1690–present.

Note: for the complete list of historical newspapers and other periodicals, please visit https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/utmprimary.

Memoirs, Autobiographies, Personal Records (e.g., Letters and Diaries)

When you search books in the Library catalogue, entering <b>Canad* AND Biography</b> will allow you to retrieve biographic books.

Pursuing China: Memoir of a Beaver Liaison Officer by Brian L. Evans
Call Number: E-Book
Publication Date: 2012
Brian Evans blends memoir and history to draw a vivid picture of China and its cultural outreach over the past three decades. With this book, Evans seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of the nature and wide range of Canada-China relations, an area in which he himself has played a role.
The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir by Joseph Auguste Merasty; David Carpenter
Call Number: E-Book
Publication Date: 2015-02-08
This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school. Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of "aggressive assimilation."

Digital Archives — Access via the UTL

Champlain Society Digital Collection
The Making of the Modern World
[Gale] It offers primary sources for Western trade, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It also offers resources in the role of finance and taxation and the growth of the early modern monarchy.
PART I: The Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature, 1450–1850
PART II: 1851–1914
PART III: 1890–1945
The collection includes more than 30 percent of the content in non-English languages.
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926
American Indian Histories and Cultures
For example,
– Canada
– Fur Trade under Online Exhibitions
The transatlantic trade in fur developed with the first fishermen to visit what are now the Maritime provinces of Canada, exploiting the abundant cod stocks of the Grand Banks.
Power and Profit: British Colonial Trade in America and the Caribbean, 1678-1825
American West, Early 18th to Mid-20th Century

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Government Documents

Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources

The following databases include government/official documents from Canada:

Canadiana Online
— The Government Publications collection includes over 1.7 million pages of historical pre-1920 colonial, provincial and federal government documents. The collection includes
⚈ A selection of pre-Confederation official government publications produced by colonial legislatures, such as acts, legislative debates, legislative journals, and sessional papers
⚈ A selection of federal government documents published 1867-1900, such as acts, parliamentary debates, parliamentary journals, Royal Commission reports and sessional papers
⚈ Pre-1900 publications from France and Great Britain that relate to the governance of Canada, such as treaties, acts, bills, correspondence, British Parliamentary papers and reports
⚈ Civil service lists, 1885-1900
⚈ Pre-1900 official guides for prospective immigrants to Canada
⚈ Selected speeches from statesmen such as Sir John A. Macdonald, Joseph Howe, Charles Tupper, Henri Bourassa, and others
Héritage
Library and Archives Canada: Collection Search
— Discover the Collection: Browse by Topic
— — Indigenous Heritage
— — Indian Affairs Annual Reports, 1864-1990
— ARCHIVED - Canadian Confederation