Diaspora Newspapers

Scholars like Michael Suleiman and Irene Joshi have demonstrated the documentary value of newspapers published in and for the growing number of expatriate communities around the world. Suleiman showed how much of the political and cultural lives of Arab communities in the United States are revealed through their newspapers and journals. (See Focus, Spring 2004.)

In a paper presented at the 1997 Symposium on Access to and Preservation of Global Newspapers, Irene Joshi illustrated how the idea of Indian independence was carried by newspapers to South Asian communities in China, the Caribbean, South Africa, Switzerland, and San Francisco long before Britain ended their dominion over the subcontinent.

CRL holds more than 1,000 newspaper titles published in the U.S., and many more from other regions of the world, for specific ethnic groups from the mid-1800s to the present. In many cases the files are extensive and often are the longest or most complete files extant. Follow this link to CRL’s searchable database of the US ethnic titles.

Many of these holdings are in microform, but some of the titles still are held only in original format.