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On April 20, 1955, The Rebel Yell made its debut as Nevada Southern’s student newspaper, its headline announcing the opening of the campus social season, the Confederate Cotillion. The six excited candidates for “Southern Belle” were pictured and described in detail. In another column a citizen’s committee was reported raising funds to acquire land for the new campus and to build a student union building. From this 50’s time-warp to today, The Rebel Yell has provided what its founding editors promised: “The paper stands to serve the students, and will try to fulfill every need. Its pages will contain news of every type – varying from feature articles to campus happenings.”
In fulfilling this mission The Rebel Yell has also succeeded in documenting the most important part of a university, its student life. Its pages reflect that microcosm of American youth culture represented by university students, morphing through hair and clothing styles, on a campus close to the throb of America’s fantasy city, Las Vegas. It is a reflection of collegiate life: campus events, student life, political issues and activism, theater, dance, and music. But beyond the traditional photos of sporting events and campus buildings, the life on an urban campus is an important part, not just of the history of the university, but also of its setting in the city of Las Vegas. For those of us at UNLV, it is our history.
This project captures over 30,000 pages of The Rebel Yell from its inaugural issue in 1956 through 2010, at which point it went online and is available on its own website with its own digital archive. The issues from 1955 through 1986 were digitized from microfilm and are in black and white, while issues from 1987 to 2010 were digitized from the original copies and include color.
2010 - present, can be accessed online via Newsbank (ACE account required for off-campus access)
2017 - present, can be accessed online under its new name, The Scarley and Gray Free Press
The simple search box (in the heading of the website) searches for items across all fields in the Rebel Yell collection for all terms that you put in the search box, in any order. For example, if you search for "women's basketball", the search engine searches for items containing "women's" AND "basketball". (Or click advanced search to use other types of searches.)
The simple search box supports the use of a wildcard operator that enables you to search for approximate terms. Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a search term will search for results with none, or any number of any characters appended to the root search term. For example, test* will find results with the words "test," "tests," "tested" and so on.
After using the simple search or Advanced Search, you can start a new simple search by typing the search term and selecting New Search instead of Within Results. To clear an Advanced Search, click the Clear All button.
After using the simple search or Advanced Search, you can make your initial results more specific by searching Within Results from the simple search box or by choosing from the keywords listed in the Narrow Your Search By box. You also can add or remove collections from the search. If you have narrowed your search too far, you can step back and display previous results by removing the keywords you used in your search path (click the X next to the search term displayed at the top of your results).
This collection delivers digitized newspapers with a feature called article segmentation making the paper fully discoverable with easy to clip articles of interest. Use the search box to look for and discover article-level keywords, then view results in the newspaper viewer. This viewer highlights individual articles within each page. When a user hovers over the page contents, articles are highlighted and clickable. When double-clicked, an article viewer pops up to display all parts of the article together in a single window, even if the original article was printed on multiple pages of the newspaper. The article also can be downloaded or printed.
Contact Digital Collections for general comments and feedback on this website and if you are experiencing technical problems. UNLV Special Collections holds the full run of The Rebel Yell (print and microfilm) in the University Archives, and staff is always available to provide research assistance or assist with reproduction requests.
With a grant from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and financial support from Consolidated Students of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (CSUN) and the UNLV Graduate & Professional Student Association (GPSA), UNLV's student newspaper will gain increased visibility and will be infinitely more accessible.
Staff in the Digital Collections Department completed several tasks related to transferring the original issues of The Rebel Yell into powerful digital versions that can be searched by date, proper name, subject or any word in the text of the article. Some of the tasks taken on by the team include:
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© 2014, The Rebel Yell Project
