As of midnight last night, the New York Times has made anything in their archives newer than 1987 available for free. Even more interestingly, everything in the public domain (1851-1922) is also available for free, although it looks like they’re mostly just in PDF format. How can they do this? They expect to make more in increased advertising revenue than they did with the paid subscriptions.

You can find the NYTimes coverage of the most important events of the 19th century pretty easily:

Go, search!

Update, 20 Sep: Jason Kottke has posted some more of his own finds.