Black Panther Party

ProQuest Historical Newspapers searches the fulltext of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Gazette and the Chicago Defender. You can also search any of these individually. The Defender, a very influential, nationally circulated black newspaper, might be especially important for your research. It might be interesting, for example, to compare news coverage in the Defender with coverage in the mainstream press, the ethnic press indexed in Ethnic New Watch (see that tab), and with coverage in the Black Panther Newspaper available in Black Thought in Culture (see that tab).

Before you enter search terms, you might want to first specify a date range to search under Publication Date. Then you might enter, in the top search box "black panther*"; "double quotes" to search for a phrase and the * is a wildcard that will get forms of a word, in this case a singular and plural. Then you could add additional terms in the search boxes below that are specific to your topic, "food program*", for example.

The default search to the right of the search box, Anywhere, in this database means searching in the full text of all the articles, editorials, etc., in all of the newspapers. But from the drop-down menu on the right you can choose instead Anywhere Except Full Text, which searches just the first paragraphs and the headlines.

When searching for certain personal names, you'll need to search for both a given name and the name the person assumed when he or she joined the movement. For example, "assata shakur*" or "joanne chesimard*". The mainstream press often used just the given name.

By default, the results of a search will be arranged in order of relevance; the articles that the database thinks might be the most relevant will be closest to the top of your results list. You may want to resort chronologically by changing Relevance in the upper left to Oldest First, then clicking Sort.

You can search many other black and mainstream newspapers from ProQuest, but you'll have to visit another library, most likely Princeton University or the New York Public Library, to do so. Click Email Me below the Your Footnotes, Bibliography tab if this is of interest or if you have any questions about the ProQuest newspapers.