Research Guides: History Resources (UNH Durham): Using the NYT TimesMachine

Using the New York Times TimesMachine

From the Databases page, search for New York Times and click into the New York Times Online.

Scroll all the way down to the bottom and in the far-right “More" column, select TimesMachine (you can bookmark this link, if it’s easier, and it should work as long as your campus Single Sign On is active so you can get through the paywall).

Click the magnifying glass icon to open the search box. You can keyword search the entire archive (18 September 1851 - 31 December 2002) from the search box here, or click the (tiny) Change Dates option to search specific dates.

Definitely put “compound terms” in quotation marks.

Example: Do a search for “moon landing” and view the results. Try adding: AND armstrong and the results will be narrowed.

Like most results lists, this one can be sorted by “relevance” by default, but you can also change the list to “Oldest First” or “Newest First.”

Using the above example, change the sort to “oldest first” and the earliest result is one from 1966 with President Johnson referencing the goal of landing on the moon, and it included an accompanying photo of Neil Armstrong in the Gemini 8 capsule. Armstrong is also mentioned in the article itself.

If you want to print/save the article, from the article's information box on the left (click on the article if it doesn’t immediately show up) you can select Continue Reading PDF (the PDF is blue to signal that you can click on it). Then you can save or download the article as you normally would.

That information box can also provide a permalink to the article, but test this. Of course, it will only work if folks have signed in through the campus Single Sign On to get through the paywall.

As admittedly clunky as this is, there are a couple of perks to this interface in that the articles are shown in context and with the accompanying photographs, which other access points can't [without securing separate permissions] because of the 2001 Tasini case. This makes the TimesMachine act more like a microfilm reader.