Hello all,
I am a Bangladeshi and I am watching my country's history being rewritten by one political party that managed to take over my country's democracy and has been running rigged elections to win.
If you know the basics of Bangladesh's history, then you will know the Sheikh Mujib helped free the country and then ruled till his 1975, then a coup that ended up making Ziaur Rahman a military dictator till 1982, followed by another coup that ended up making Hossain Ershad yet another dictator. And more nonsensical drama in the 90's and 2000's by the daughter of Mujib (Sheikh Hasina) and the wife of Zia (Khaleda Zia).
As of 2009, Sheikh Hasina managed to win and has been abusing her power to the greatest extent to punish the opposing party and any opposition she faces. Our last election in 2019 was laughable. And now we see our PM on her personal campaign to avenge her father's death at the cost of democracy and the livelihoods of millions of people.
In fact, they already fucked our constitution in multiple stages. And free speech is gone. Writing or speaking any history other than the officially approved one will land you in jail, pretty classic dictatorships.
But I wanna collect and preserve the actual history from 1971 till now.
Recent history is easy enough, thanks to online news sites and social media.
But I want solid reports from 70's, 80's and 90's.
I have checked out the NY Times archive, which provides detailed daily articles from the printed news papers of that time, quite helpful.
Also there are books from many countries like USA, UK and India, also helpful.
But I am looking for more archives with rich sources of info.
Where can I find more historical news reports about Bangladesh's 70's, 80's and 90's news online?
Thanks in advance, and a happy new year!
Hi,
I'm an academic research librarian, and my personal research interests lie in local history. I'm going to address your question in a couple of different ways.
First, in general digitization takes a lot of money. I just finished applying for a 50k grant for my institution for digitizing only 1000 items in our archives. Given the amount of money it takes, a lot of archival items are still held in physical format. In newspapers, you're generally looking at microfilm. I'm not sure whether you are in the US or bangladesh, but in the US it is generally possible to obtain microfilm rolls held in another institution through interlibrary loan, your local librarian can help you make a request and then you would use a microfilm machine to look at the film and either print the relevant pages or save to PDF. Librarians will be happy to walk you through the process of ordering something through ILL and using a microfilm machine, we get lots of patrons who aren't familiar. :)
For bangladeshi newspapers held in the US, I was able to find these held in the CRL and these from the library of congress. Playing around with the library of congress search may yield more results. I have also had luck looking through Yale's newspaper holdings.
If you are in bangladesh, I can be of less help, because I know how the system works there less well. Google did suggest that there is a bangladesh national library, which would probably be where I would start if it is accessible to the public. Often a national library will have newspaper collections, or at least the librarians there would know about other archives. Another place to look would be larger public libraries or academic libraries, which may have collections archiving local newspapers for historical purposes. Finally, you may have luck going to offices of longstanding newspapers themselves. Generally, at least in my experience, newspapers have their own archives of their work. All of this depends on these places policies of allowing unaffiliated researchers, of course.
I hope that this helps. Best of luck to you.