Newspapers, journals and magazines published during the nineteenth century are an invaluable primary resource for historians because they offer commentary on the events and ideas of the past from the people who were around to witness them. The quantity and largely unindexed nature of these periodicals, though, has made researching their printed contents an onerous prospect. To locate a particular article within them has often required scholars to spend weeks or months in specialist archives, reading through thousands of pages of text to find what they are looking for—a task that required as much luck as it did persistence. The development of computer technologies in recent decades, however, has transformed this research process. Because the copyright on many nineteenth-century works has also recently expired, these periodicals have been included among a first wave of large-scale digitization projects. Thanks to these initiatives, millions of pages from the historical periodicals have been scanned, transformed into digital formats, and made available online. Not only has this meant that they are able to be viewed by many more people, but they are also more easily searched. By entering key search terms, historians can now sift through many more sources in a much shorter time.