Plain Old Text is a free archive of historical sources, transcribed as plain text.

Most of the material comes from the primary sources used by Victor Elgersma-Azmanov in his essays.For example, see “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Mid-Victorian Press” (2026), or “Hands-on History: Benefits and Drawbacks” (2026).

Every transcription comes with scans of the original pages and a link back to the digital source, so you can always check the text against the page it came from. Every transcription comes with a chicago-style citation, so you can easily use it in your work.

We welcome metadata corrections and new contributions. Either email the author or make a pull request on our GitHub repository.Email: victor@vjbe.net. GitHub: github.com/victorelgersma/old-news.

Why plain text?

Primary sources are the bricks of a historical argument. Quoting them well takes sensitivity and attention to context, so historians have to go back to their sources often, and be able to search them quickly (with Ctrl+F). History is also a collective enterprise: historians should be able to send a source to a colleague and ask for help in interpreting it.

All of this is very difficult when a source is only available as a grainy scan or image. This site aims to fix that, one source at a time. We chose plain text because it is an open, portable file format that is likely to survive many decades into the future, unlike proprietary formats such as .docx.Technically we use Markdown rather than plain text, but Markdown is plain text with a few light conventions for headings and emphasis, and it reads fine as it is.

Isn't this someone else's job?

Why should a historian deal with transcription and hosting? Isn't this the job of publishers?

This site does not try to compete with the large newspaper archives on the number of sources. It aims for quality instead: every transcription is checked by hand against the original, and every article comes with an accurate citation. The person best placed to do this work is precisely the historian who is using these sources in their own research.

Is this copyright infringement?

No. We only transcribe texts that are in the public domain.

Why did you make Plain Old Text?

The project began, under the name Old News, out of frustration while reading a history of 19th-century science that leans heavily on newspaper articles but leaves the reader to hunt down the original pages on platforms like The British Newspaper Archive. Since the texts are in the public domain, it seemed a small effort to transcribe them and host them somewhere easy to read and reference. The archive has grown since then, and so has its scope, hence the new name.

Where should I look for digitised materials?

A few good places to start:

• Delpher: Dutch historical newspapers, books and journals.
• Gallica: the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
• Gale: research databases and primary source archives.
• The British Newspaper Archive: British and Irish newspapers.
• The Spectator Archive: every issue of The Spectator since 1828.