The New York Times provides full-text access to all issues published from 1851 through 1922. The entire run of the Times is searchable, but articles published after 1922 must be purchased.
The archive has both simple and advanced searching options; the search engine searches the full-text of the articles. All sections of the paper are included.
Results may be sorted by closest match (default), oldest or newest first.
Sample search: When did the Strike for Bread and Roses begin and how long did it last? What was the outcome?
A search for “Bread and Roses” Strike does not yield any results. Apparently, the name, “Bread and Roses,” was not used at the time of the strike. To answer this question, one needs to know that strike occurred in Lawrence, Mass. A search for “Lawrence, Mass. strike” yields many pages of results. If we know approximately when the strike occurred, we can limit the search by date, for example, 1910-1915. These results look good, since they are all clustered around 1912. Sorting by “oldest first” lets us review a chronology of events, eventually leading to the resolution of the strike on page 10. This is just one example of an event in Massachusetts that gained widespread coverage in the New York Times.
Search the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html