A little context: I'm a software guy looking to learn a new language. Best way of learning is by doing and I've wanted to make one idea a reality:
If I could map as much newspaper articles and data as possible, I could provide anyone willing a DAILY "newspaper" (via twitter, email, SMS, RSS, anything) except as far removed from present day as they'd like.
For example, on the day of this post you're reading now (according to wikipedia):
1099 – The First Crusade concluded with the Battle of Ascalon and Fatimid forces under Al-Afdal Shahanshah retreating to Egypt.
1883 – The last known quagga, a subspecies of the plains zebra, died at the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.
1914 – World War I: Despite the Belgian victory in the Battle of Halen, they were ultimately unable to stop the German invasion of Belgium.
1948 – About 600 unarmed Pashtuns in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, protesting the arrests of the leaders of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, were massacred by police and militia forces.
1990 – American paleontologist Sue Hendrickson found the most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered near Faith, South Dakota, U.S.
Imagine how sweet it would be to see actual newspaper headlines and texts with an interval of your choosing every morning. One year you could live through your boring life plus a war, another year you could experience WWII headline by headline - each one a new thing at breakfast.
Hope that makes sense. It's mostly a project for ME because I feel like it'd put my life and experiences into context - reading them day by day.
In order to accomplish this I need a ton of data though. Any help?
They exist (although back to the 1800s... you aren't going to be finding anything for 1099), but they are mostly paywalled. Companies don't digitize these things for free. Many Newspapers will have their own archives usually accessible with a subscription, i.e. if you get the New York Times, you can access the New York Times archives.
There are also research archives, such as ProQuest, where many different newspapers are accessible with a subscription, which your local library might have. More general archives also exist, like newspapers.com, which again, require a subscription. You are essentially wanting to create something like those, which while technically possible, would require massive licensing fees to use the digitized material, or else a massive amount of time and effort by a very, very, very large team to digitize it yourself (and also a massive amount of money, of course, to get the actual material).
Just to add on to what u/Georgy_K_Zhukov is saying: These archives absolutely exist, but they are archives. I did my master's thesis on the partisan press in a Midwestern state after the civil war. That required going to the state historical society library and finding what newspapers they had on hand. They have papers dating back to the 1830s, but they're on microfilm. So then you're looking at digitizing the microfilm, which is non-trivial in and of itself given how much the original source material is degraded over time and the microfilm itself is degraded over time. Then you're looking at finding where an article starts and ends, which is not easy with modern newspapers let alone archaic ones, and doing OCR to associate it in some way with a headline or searchable content.
Google has their own free archive of a lot of papers. Earliest ones you'll find are probably from the 1800's.