"I checked Gale's 19th Century U.S. newspapers database, and there are a whopping 375 articles from 1837 mentioning 'hard times,' 50 of them using the phrase in the headline of the article".
In writing "Rin-Tin-Tin: The Movie Star," I found newspaper databases to be invaluable sources.
(Looking back at yellowed newspaper databases, I see that one of the few people who got it right at the time was my colleague William Safire).
Using my home-brought laptop, I am able to search newspaper databases and abstracts for my research papers in college-level classes.
With the help of librarians and Clare Sears, the one scholar who's published an essay on the murder of the frog-catching, cross-dressing Jenny Bonnet, I tracked down — often in online newspaper databases — about sixty newspaper reports about her and Blanche Beunon, who was with Bonnet in the saloon when the bullets came through the window.
I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me - for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient.
But it isn't even necessary to hit the newspaper databases to debunk the Keds anecdote: the Oxford English Dictionary has long had an entry for sneaker with citations for the shoe sense back to 1895, when it appeared in Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary.
The information should be cross-checked with Google search results, newspaper databases and word of mouth.
The majority of the sources used in this study were obtained through research and newspaper databases from North America and the English and German-speaking countries in Europe.
Yet, it is clear from searching any of a number of newspaper databases that "Justice delayed is justice denied" was originated by the great British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone in a speech on the Irish question in the House of Commons, March 16 , 1868
