Portland Metro and Oregon Research: History

Support for research about local issues, places, laws, people, history, and more.

Check out our Oregon History Guide

For additional resources related to Oregon historical research, check out PCC's Oregon History Guide.

Oregonian Access

The oregonlive.com web site provides free full-text access to many Oregonian articles from the last few years, and supports fee-based article delivery of all Oregonian articles ($1.95 per article). The Multnomah County Public Library also provides online full text access to the Historical Oregonian (1861-1987) and current Oregonian (1987-present) to all cardholders.

Search the Oregon Newspaper Index which indexes (but does not provide full-text access to) over 845,000 articles in the Oregonian newspaper from 1851-1987. This index is maintained by the University of Oregon.

Online Primary Source Collections

Oregon Historical Quarterly

Online full-text articles from the Oregon Historical Quarterly, 1926 to the present through the JSTOR database.  After you connect, login through the Portland Community College link, and the articles will be free.

If the table of contents doesn't work for you, the more detailed Oregon Historical Quarterly Index, 1981-present (which will give you the names of people and events in these articles) will be your next step. You can use the Ctrl-F feature of your web browser search for a specific word. Be careful here. A mention of a name or event doesn't mean the article that has that name or event is in any way about that person or event.

PCC Library also has printed indexes to The Oregon Historical Quarterly, from 1900 - 1980. You will need to come to the library to see them.

Check out paper copies of Oregon Historical Quarterly from PCC Library.

Photographic Sources