Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

To make the most of searching, take advantage of the search options provided on the Advanced Search page.

• You can search the entire date range available (default), or select a specific date and limit your search to a specific year, month, or even day, using the begin date and end date lists provided. (Note: selecting the same begin month/day/year and end month/day/year will provide links to every page available for that specific date.)
• You can enter a specific search term or terms in the Keyword boxes provided. The operators provided will influence the results of your search significantly and can be used in separate searches or in conjunction within a single search.

Search for a Phrase

• Enter your phrase in the appropriate "...with the phrase" search box.
• When searching for a phrase, enter the words in the order they are most likely to occur.
• The order of search words does not affect the scope of the search results, but it will affect the order of their display.

Search for Words Near Each Other

• Enter your keywords into the "...with the words" search box.
• Select a numeric value for how close the words should be to each other (proximity).
• This type of search can be helpful in narrowing results on a given person, place or event to a specific aspect of that person, place or event. For example: "Roosevelt conservation" within 10 words will result mostly in articles about President Theodore Roosevelt's Conservation policies during his administration.

Too Many Results - If a search generates too many results, try using more specific terms and/or limiting to a specific State of publication or a particular newspaper title. Use the search box options in combination to narrow your results. For example, use "President Roosevelt" as phrase and "Roosevelt conservation" within 10 words to narrow results to text about only President Roosevelt's conservation policies.

Too Few Results - If a search generates too few results, try alternate terms or broader subjects and relax any limiting criteria (date ranges, state limitations, etc.).

Because language changes, be sure to use search terms used at the time the materials were created, even if those terms are now obsolete. For example, the following historic terms will produce more results than their modern-day counterparts:

Use the names of towns, landmarks, bridges, buildings, and other geographic features that were current when the materials you are searching were created. For instance, the state of Oklahoma was referred to as both "Indian Territory" and "Oklahoma Territory" prior to its admission as a state, so searching for "Indian Territory" may produce more search results if searching on topics related to Oklahoma.

Matching a phrase can be useful for searching place names or when common words have a particular sense used in combination.

For example, the term "normal school" was used in the early twentieth century to describe schools for training teachers. Searching for the phrase may eliminate results containing the words "normal" and "school" in unrelated ways.

Note: Some very common words, such as and, of, the, a, and to, are ignored even when matching exact phrases.