For the first time in history, the Daily Mail’s special edition that was printed on board the transatlantic cruise liners between Southampton and New York between 1923 and 1931 is available online to students, researchers and public libraries. Printed daily on the 5-day voyages, the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition is extremely rare and not even held at The British Library.

The Atlantic Edition is part of the Daily Mail Historical Archive from Cengage Learning that dates from 1896 to 2004 and boasts nearly 1.2 million pages of content from the paper including advertisements, news stories and images.

More information: Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004

Andover, Hampshire UK – Gale, part of Cengage Learning, today announced the release of the Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004, which presents more than 100 years of the Daily Mail newspaper.
This archive provides students, researchers and public libraries with unprecedented digital access to one of Britain’s most influential papers and its views. In nearly 1.2 million pages of content from the paper, including all of the major news stories, features, advertisements and images, the Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004 captures the development of 20th century culture and society in a fully searchable and browse-able digital format, providing an important alternative perspective to ‘the newspaper of record’, The Times, which is also available from Gale as a Digital Archive.

As well as the regular edition of the newspaper, uniquely the Daily Mail Historical Archive also includes the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition, which was published on board the transatlantic liners that sailed between New York and Southampton between 1923 and 1931. Issues are extremely rare and are not held by the British Library or available digitally from any other source.

The Daily Mail Atlantic Edition, which was published on board the transatlantic liners in the 1920s – Issues are extremely rare and are not held by the British Library.

Described by The New Yorker as “the newspaper that rules Britain”, the Daily Mail has been a key opinion former and driver of social change throughout its 115 year history. It campaigned against Lord Kitchener for failing to supply British troops properly in the First World War, contributing to the change of government in 1916. The Daily Mail was also the first newspaper to introduce a women’s magazine in 1968; pioneered the reporting of personal finance with its ‘Money Mail’ section; and founded the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1908, one of Britain’s biggest and most popular exhibitions. It currently boasts a circulation of over 2 million, and its website is the most visited newspaper site in the world.

The Daily Mail Historical Archive 1896-2004 is an online digital collection that allows users to search, retrieve and browse articles, pages and whole editions of the paper, providing a gateway to engaging stories, controversies and social issues of the last 100 years. Highlights include Sir Ernest Shackleton’s report on his expedition to the South Pole in 1909, the campaign for ‘single-men first’ conscription during the First World War, the defining photo of St Paul\’s surrounded by smoke and flames during ‘the Blitz’, exclusive coverage of the first ascent of Everest led by Edmund Hillary in 1953 and the article about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, which was used by John Lennon for the Beatles song \’A Day in the Life’.

Other defining moments highlighted by the paper include the exposé of the Moonies (Unification Church) in the story ‘The Church that Breaks Up Families’, the exclusive story of Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’ and, more recently the front page headline ‘Murderers’ featuring five men the Daily Mail accused of the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993.The archive is an important resource for all humanities and social science courses, especially in the fields of history and culture, media, literature and theatre studies. It offers comprehensive search parameters, allowing researchers to search by article title, author, page number, issue number, document number or key word. Users can also quickly browse by issue and view all articles in the sidebar. They can then save, print, bookmark or email the documents. The image viewer allows researchers to pan, grab, zoom or crop images.

Along with the Times Digital Archives and 14 other titles, the Daily Mail Historical Archive forms part of the Gale NewsVault programme, a cross-searchable collection of more than 13 million pages of newspaper and magazine archives.

Seth Cayley, Publisher of Media History at Cengage Learning EMEA, commented: “The Daily Mail has been a vigorous and vocal element of British public life since its very first issue in 1896. With a readership that has consistently comprised a significant proportion of the population, especially women, the newspaper provides an alternative voice to other newspapers currently available as digital archives, many of which had a much smaller circulation. The digital archive of the Daily Mail will make available more than 100 years of key moments in 20th century culture, society and journalism, including rare and unique content such as the Daily Mail Atlantic Edition. The ability to cross-reference the Daily Mail Historical Archive with The Times Digital Archive and Sunday Times Digital Archive will make this an important resource for anyone researching, studying or teaching across the humanities.”

Paul Dacre, Editor of the Daily Mail and Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers, said: “I am immensely proud that this unrivalled archive is to be made publicly available in digital form for the very first time.

“The Daily Mail has been essential reading for a significant and influential proportion of the population for more than a century. Not for nothing has it become known as the paper of Middle Britain.

“This fully searchable digital archive will provide an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the history of this country over the last 120 years.”

The project to digitise the Daily Mail was initiated in 2011 by Solo Syndication, the content licensing division of Associated Newspapers. This archive is available as a subscription or one-off purchase to all academic, public and government libraries.

For further information about Gale or any of its resources, please contact emea.marketing@cengage.com or visit gale.cengage.co.uk