Searching Google for contemporaneous news

A few years back, I mourned the loss of Google’s New Timeline.

I still miss that beautiful visual presentation, but you can still use Google News to search contemporaneous news.

Contemporaneous news offers students unfiltered, personal connection to the past and forces them to wrestle with issues of bias and historical perspective.

Contemporaneous news focuses a media literacy lens on how news is/was reported.

How many different ways is the same story reported? How does the story evolve over the course of days, weeks, years? How do stories reported at the time differ from the way a story is reported with the benefit of hindsight or without the homongenization of textbook coverage?

We can engage learners in considering why a story is placed where it is placed in a newspaper, why a particular headline was crafted, how our language has shifted, and why search terms may be time-contextual. (For instance, why searches for World War I, African Americans, the Holocaust, might not be effective in contemporaneous sources.)

I created a short Tildee tutorial to show my students how to use Google News to search historically.  (Thanks to Matthew Needleman for this reminder!)

Filed under: news, primary sources, search tools