All,
The Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities have announced the beta web interface for the National Digital Newspaper Program, intended to digitize and make freely available the contents of most historic major U.S. newspapers:
http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/ http://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html
Currently only the contents of newspapers from a select few states during the period 1900-1910 are available, but eventually the project will encompass all U.S. regions and the entire period 1836 to 1922.
The Library of Congress does not seem to place any legal restrictions on the use of these archives for educational purposes (though it does not guarantee that other copyright holders might not have claims) and I think even the current, limited contents of the archive will be immediately valuable for reference and illustrative purposes within Wikipedia.
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