The Freethinker
Culturally liberal, politically unaligned
Search facilities
Each search will return a page of links to individual PDF documents from the archive. You can click on those links through any PDF containing your search term.
That PDF will then be shown to you in an advanced PDF viewer with features that include within-document search. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the PDF viewer and type your search term; you will then be shown all the places it appears in that PDF and you can step through them in order.
Free-text search
NB: The archive consists of thousands of PDF documents. Please allow up to a full minute for your search results to appear before trying again or leaving the page.
Very general search terms will trigger so many (sometimes-spurious) hits that you will get a “504 Gateway Time-out” error. For example: “Pope John” should work fine, but “Pope John Paul II” will pull out so many hits in the document database that it will take too long to complete.
Longer-term, we are hoping to make embedded Google Search of the archive available. Since Google have almost unlimited compute resources available, these limitations should then disappear.
Browse the Freethinker archive by century
19th Century
Scans of The Freethinker published between 1880 and 1899.
20th Century
Scans of The Freethinker published between 1900 and 1999.
21st Century
Scans of The Freethinker published between 2000 and 2014.