About
What this is
An archive of 949 newspaper clippings about Palestinians, printed in American and Anglophone papers between 1812 and 2023. Every one of them was published at the time, for anybody to read. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023, and nothing here is about the attacks of the seventh or anything that has happened since. The archive stops the day before.
548 of these were printed before December 1987, when Hamas was founded. The oldest is from 1812. So when someone says this started in 2023, or started with Hamas, the papers answer for themselves, on their own front pages, decades before the argument existed.
What they show is how Americans were told about it, in the words the papers chose at the time. Colonizing in 1902, printed as a plain description. Colonists redeem Palestine in 1912. Three Palestinians killed, 137 injured in 1989, nobody named and nobody doing the killing. Palestinian death toll mounts in 2022. Line them up and the sentences barely move.
A century of it, written down as it happened, by people who put their names to it.
Found in the Library of Congress newspaper collections and in digitized archives, one page at a time. Where a city appears beside a paper’s name it is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping. Seventeen titles name more than one real paper — The Herald, The Gazette, The Times — and are left without a place.
A clipping is included if it is a scan of a printed page, the paper and the date can be read from the scan or confirmed against the archive it came from, Palestinians are the subject rather than the backdrop, and it was printed before 7 October 2023. News-agency copy counts as many times as it was printed, because a reader in one town saw one paper.
Counts are as of September 24, 2026, against dataset 2026-09-24.0f3959b237. The most recent clippings went in on 23 September 2026. Every clipping carries a fixed accession number, CP-1948-023 and the like, which is never reissued.
Rights
The clippings belong to the papers and wire services that printed them. They are reproduced in full for research and commentary, because a headline can only be examined whole; the oldest have passed into the public domain. Everything else — selection, transcription, counts, writing — is © Maria Robles, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The dataset is CC BY 4.0.
If you hold rights in something here and want it taken down, write to maria@rozumstudio.com and I will remove it.
Maria Robles
A writer and documentary photographer in New York, working mostly in public history. She also runs ROZUM, a growth consulting practice.
Since 2020 she has been building Slavers of New York, which documents the families who built fortunes on the slave trade and whose names are still on the city’s streets and buildings. Covered by the New York Times, Guernica, NBC and Reuters.
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