At the Providence Public Library a few days ago, I ran across a copy of The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. The book gives excerpts and essays from a cache of recently rediscovered newspapers for the “sporting male.”
Seeing the book reminded me of one of my favorite online resources, the digitized version of The National Police Gazette. Yale has the entire run (1845–1906) of this newspaper, keyword-searchable through ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
The Police Gazette is really not a police gazette; it more often covers burlesque shows, boxing, violent crime, and other bawdiness. One particular specialty is engravings and photographs of burlesque performers.
I always find bawdy humor from bygone ages really entertaining. Plus, I actually did find the Police Gazette useful for a genuine academic purpose, a paper about boxing.
If your library doesn’t subscribe to the digital version of the National Police Gazette (outrageous!), you can still get a taste of it in a fun book, The Police Gazette, edited by Gene Smith and Jayne Barry Smith. Introduction by Tom Wolfe! And if your library doesn’t have that, well, what kind of library is it, anyway?