Newspapers tend to report on specific, concrete events, rather than broader historical abstractions. For example, you'll find less reporting on the Great Depression in general, but more reporting on specific bank closings or government relief programs. Similarly, less reporting on race relations in general, but maybe a little more on white supremacy in general, and even more on the Ku Klux Klan in general, and even more on specific acts of Klan violence. The Ku Klux Klan is perhaps an exception, in that, during the 1920s especially, there was considerable public interest in the Klan, and quite a bit of reporting on its aims, methods, and its organizational structure in general.

Chronologies (sometimes called timelines) can be a useful tool in getting at the more concrete events that newspapers would have reported. Chronologies "present facts arranged by the time sequence of their occurrence. Often chronologies present parallel listings that display temporal contexts of different areas of study (e.g. politics, arts, technology, religion) simultaneously, so that a reader may correlate the events of one area with contemporaneous, earlier, or later developments in other subject areas."¹

1. Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 265.