The historiography of the Palestinian press provides a useful example of both the recent progress made in the study of the broader history of Palestine over the past few decades, as well as continuing difficulties for the field. Recent studies have narrowed their focus to individual newspapers, themes, or selected time periods. I argue that this microhistorical approach should be reconsidered. Because of the overwhelming quantity of published material, this almost exclusive focus on the level of discourse has resulted in a fractured understanding of the Arabic press in Palestine and its role in the broader history. Perhaps more importantly, the focus on discourse has reinforced “1948” as a total rupture, naturalizing this endpoint as the end of Palestinian history. Of course, there are valid structural reasons for this approach; however, this also reflects a failure to move beyond the framework of nationalism, which subjugates history to political events. One possible avenue for future research is to highlight continuities with the period after 1948, by tracing what happened to these individuals and institutions. This paper focuses on scholarship covering the period of 1908-1948, and examines a number of historical accounts in Arabic and English that have attempted to document the role of the Arabic-language press in Palestine. It is essential here to note that the two strains of research, divided by language, have largely not been in conversation with one another. While some researchers publishing in English have occasionally drawn upon the rich Arabic literature, the reverse has occurred even less frequently, leading to a major gap between the two with respect to both focus and methodology. Since the mid-1970s, the Arabic language scholarship focusing specifically on the Palestinian press has mainly followed the pattern set by the fourth and final volume of Philippe de Tarazi’s landmark reference work, Tarikh al-Sihafa al-‘Arabiyya (The History of the Arab Press), published in 1933, resulting in a rich collection of indexes and annotated bibliographies, among other formats, documenting the pre-1948 Palestinian press. The dominant strand of research in Arabic, therefore, is primarily concerned with proving the very existence of the periodicals, and secondarily with documenting their contents. In the meantime, English-language research into the history of Palestinian newspapers has approached the press in the context of the broader political history, particularly by attempting to situate the role of the Palestinian press in the development of Palestinian nationalism prior to 1948.