Are there any good, free newspaper archives with search tools? I specifically want newspapers from before the 20th century. I just love reading about events as they were percieved by the people living in the same time period, but who were not necessarily affected by them
There are quite a few US state newspaper digitization efforts and many of them are free. Chronicling America through the Library of Congress is a broad sampling of many of those projects.
Wikipedia keeps a good list of online historic newspapers too.