A digitised archive of American newspapers running from the 1730s through the 1960s — six million stories, three thousand-plus mastheads, with an AI research assistant for following a thread when straight search runs out.

The pull is the same one that draws people to Newspapers.com or the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America: pre-Google news as it actually appeared on the page. A great-grandparent’s wedding notice, a small-town bank failure from 1893, the way a single weather front gets reported in a dozen cities on the same day. Snewpapers organises that into 24 categories and a thousand-plus subcategories, plus a daily “Today in History” feed that surfaces what was happening on the date you’re reading.

The differentiator is “The Sleuth,” an AI research assistant that — per the site — has actually read the papers, so you can ask follow-up questions instead of grinding through OCR’d full-text search. That’s the kind of feature genealogy and long-form research quietly need: the difference between finding a name and assembling a story.

Honest limits: it’s American-focused, not global, and the coverage stops in the 1960s — most living-memory news isn’t in there. Browsing is free, but you’ll need a free account to do much beyond the front door.