If you wanted to find a glimpse at what life looked like in 1851, where would you look? Historical books dive deep into specific issues. Museums show artifacts from the era. But newspapers provide a firsthand, historical account to the day-to-day stories of a community.
With your Delaware County District Library card, you are now able to look through 167 years of newspaper archives from the New York Times. Previously, this resource had only been available to users sitting inside the library, and the years of the archive were broken into two sections – 1851 to 1922 and 1981 through today.
The full archives are now available to library cardholders, regardless of their location. Remote access to the premium archives in their entirety, including years 1923-1980, is available when library users simply log in to their My Account page. On the left-hand side of the page, below the general account information is a link titled “New York Times Access.” Click the “Redeem Now” button under the link and you’re on your way to unlimited historical access.
An account is required, but it remains free for library users. Having an account allows users to save articles and to subscribe to any of the more than 40 daily, weekly or monthly newsletters. Book lovers might enjoy the “Books” newsletter, delivered twice a week, which promises to give first access to book news, reviews, and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Additionally, this week the Columbus Metropolitan Library purchased lifetime digital archive rights to the Columbus Dispatch newspapers, dating from 1871 to 1985. As members of the Central Library Consortium, Delaware Library users will soon also have access to these archives. Information will be available on the Delaware Library website as early as next month.
A writer in this week’s Times book review notes that we’re currently experiencing a boom in novels by women that have a future setting and explore gender and power, misogyny and equality. Here are some of the new novels in this genre worth exploring.
• “Those Who Knew” by Idra Novey. A young woman who suspects that a powerful senator she was involved with back in her student activist days may be guilty of murder faces the consequences of her own silence ten years previously, when she told no one about the violent incident that ended their relationship.
• “Hazards of Time Travel” by Joyce Carol Oates. A recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America that existed eighty years before.
• “Before She Sleeps” by Bina Shah. In a world where men greatly outnumber women, an underground collective of women called the Panah provide the rich and elite with a type of commodity no one can buy – intimate, non-sexual companionship.
• “Vox” by Christina Dalcher. Marginalized in a near-future America where the government limits women to no more than 100 spoken words daily before outlawing women’s education and employment altogether, a former doctor resolves to be heard for the sake of her daughter.
