Part 3
The New York Times
Grand Canyon and lower Colorado River articles and reports in The New York Times from 1851 to Present
(Divided into two sections: 1) Chronological listing; 2) Alphabetical listing of articles that have author by-lines. Listings are cross-indexed to indicate which parts of the bibliography individual items pertain.)
OVERVIEW. The New York Times has long been widely available on microfilm, and now in
digital format.* The first issue of what originally was named New-York Daily Times appeared
September 18, 1851 (changed to The New York Times in 1857). Its comprehensive and
authoritative editorial view of national affairs, as well as its traditionally well-respected
writing, makes it a useful resource on national perspectives of events and issues in the
Southwest. The longevity of this newspaper allows it to serve the Grand Canyon-Colorado
River bibliography back to the time of the first American expeditions through what would be
Arizona, by Lorenzo Sitgreaves (1851) and Joseph C. Ives (1857-1858) as well as on the
Colorado by John Wesley Powell (1869, 1871, 1872).
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*New York Times archive search website: http://nytimes.com/search/ (portions of this website may require registration for a fee). The proliferation of newspapers now accessible online rather reduces the original, enthusiastic purpose of this part of THE GRAND CANON, which originally was Part 9 of the 1981 print version, Bibliography of the Grand Canyon and the Lower Colorado River, 1540-1980. At that time, access was only through archived hard copies or on microfilm. The revised 2nd Edition (1990) introduced a guide to regional newspapers (Part 10 of that edition), again with the thought that it would assist users in search of repositories that might hold them or microfilmed copies. (See the Appendix to Part 1 in this bibliography for a rundown of the contents of the predecessors to THE GRAND CANON, and Part 31 for the current newspaper guide.) Today, many of these titles are accessible online, including the fully searchable New York Times, though some remain stubbornly secluded in the world of paper. It must be additionally noted that the online presentation of the Times has evolved, and it is more difficult now to obtain proper citations from those issues. The Times archive may permit examination of PDF copies of whole issues as well as individual articles. But more recent years are no longer available as images from the printed paper, nor are original paginations always indicated. Indeed, sometimes it is difficlult to distinguish between articles that were in inkprint and those that were only available online; a serious consideration when one expects to have access to dispersed, identical copies particularly in a “doomsday” scenario of the cessation of the web.