SNEWPapers

SNEWPapers is a digital archive and research platform built around a massive collection of historical American newspapers. Its core function is to let you search through 6 million stories extracted from papers published between the 1730s and 1960s. Unlike a simple text search, SNEWPapers uses AI to understand the meaning behind your queries, helping you find articles about specific concepts or events even if the exact keywords aren't present in the text.

What makes SNEWPapers stand out is its AI-driven approach to organizing and interacting with history. The platform's AI has read and categorized the entire archive. This powers features like 'The Sleuth,' an AI research assistant you can ask direct questions. It will scan the archive and provide answers backed by citations from the original newspapers. You can also filter results through a detailed taxonomy of 24 categories and over 1,000 sub-categories, or by state and date, to quickly narrow vast information down to what you need.

This tool is built for anyone doing deep, source-based historical research. Academic historians, students working on theses, journalists investigating long-term trends, and genealogists tracing family stories will find it most useful. It turns the tedious process of sifting through microfilm or poorly OCR'd scans into an interactive discovery session, where you can ask the archive what it knows about 'early labor strikes in Pennsylvania' or build a collection of front-page reports from the week the Titanic sank.