The Akron Buzzard from Akron, Ohio, targeted several different but related audiences, devoting itself to “Temperance, Morality, Mechanic Arts, Satire, News of the Day, and Amusement.” The rise of precision metal manufacturing and the introduction of steam power into factories made it particularly important for workers to be sober and clear-headed, leading many mechanics and factory owners to be advocates of temperance. And though in many ways its inclusion of temperance and morality pieces situates it with other reform papers, the addition of information aimed at mechanics broadens its appeal. True to its word, this issue has stories about a death due to intemperance, the misbehavior of some young gentlemen in church, disturbances caused by a gang of teenage boys, the value of mechanical trades, local news tidbits, and jokes. 

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Among the print media reform movements used to spread their messages were newspapers. This temperance newspaper was printed in Springfield, Massachusetts, and distributed throughout Hampden County, providing a unifying voice for the local temperance community. The newspaper—which took its name from the Washingtonian Society, a precursor to Alcoholics Anonymous that focused specifically on an individual’s relationship to alcohol rather than society’s as a whole—included stories about the ill effects of drink, positive facts about temperance, and news of success stories. In addition to the focus on temperance, it also included some local news and advertisements, as well as other miscellany.

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 ]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The proliferation of newspapers targeted at specific audiences did not stop with language, religion, or reform. Also included were “racy” or “sporting” newspapers, aimed at men, particularly young bachelors. Reaching their peak in the 1840s, these papers are full of colorful stories and provocative illustrations about illicit and immoral activities, boxing matches and cockfights, crime and vice, gambling and drinking, and tell-all scandals.

The Flash is one example. Among the pages in this issue are a disclaimer about libel lawsuits leveled against the paper, bawdy verses, and a notice from a woman named Mary Moore asking for a certain prominent “gentleman(?)” to return a valuable hair brush and pay a balance due. There is also a story about a woman who drowned in the North River because she drank too much, fell in, and couldn’t keep her head above water because her India rubber bustle “elevated that part of her person which has no need to breathe above the surface and depressed her head, and thus she perished.”

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 ]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The New-York Commercial Advertiser was perhaps the most prosperous of the half dozen or so mercantile dailies that dominated journalism in New York in the 1820s and 1830s before the rise of penny papers such as the New York Sun. These papers were aimed at the political and business elites of the city, typically selling by subscription at the relatively high price of six cents a copy. The Commercial Advertiser’s name suggests its content: lots of financial and market information and lots of advertising, which was often also aimed at businesspeople. This particular issue from 1831 is somewhat unusual. While often the first and fourth pages of the mercantile newspapers were dominated by advertising, this issue devotes its entire page 1 to a history of France.

The Commercial Advertiser was one of the most durable fixtures of nineteenth-century journalism in New York. It survived, with just slight name changes, from 1797 to 1904. Though the paper was mainly concerned with commercial news and information, it also engaged with the major political issues of its time, including a long-standing opposition to slavery. 

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Aside from advances in printing technology and the development of the steam railroad, the telegraph was the biggest technological influence on news media in antebellum America. From 1844, when the first message was sent by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) on an experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, to 1861, when the first transcontinental line was completed, the rapid expansion of the telegraph network revolutionized the distribution of news. Many newspapers began to carry “News by Telegraph” sections.

One of the first national news events directly influenced by the telegraph was the Panic of 1857. Due to a confluence of national and international trends that were already causing economic strain—falling grain prices, United States cotton being undersold, overproduction of goods, overbuilding of railroads—the failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company in August 1857 spurred the panic into life. It gained momentum as banks began to put restrictions on transactions. Investors took this as a sign that a larger economic disaster was looming and so began to make poor deals on stock sales or pull out of the stock market altogether. The loss of a ship in September carrying a large shipment of gold bound for eastern banks sealed the deal. By early October, panicked depositors were withdrawing money from banks, and news of bank and business failures and general economic chaos spread instantly throughout the United States via telegraph, further inflaming the panic.

Although the Northeast was hit hardest, the panic extended throughout the country and the resulting depression had global effects. The significant part the telegraph played in the rapid spread of economic news can be seen in this “News by Telegraph” section in the Richmond Whig from October 9. There is news about failures, suspensions, and financial plans in New York, the center of the crisis, but also news from New Orleans, Alexandria, and Philadelphia.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View image of full page]]> Among the shortages faced in the South as the war progressed was paper. To combat the problem, Southerners began to repurpose paper in any form they could, including wallpaper. Though in most instances wallpaper repurposing was for home use, in rare cases it was also used for publications. This was the solution J. M. Swords, editor and publisher of the Daily Citizen in Vicksburg, Mississippi, used for the June 16, 18, 20, 27, 30, and July 2, 1863, issues of his newspaper. Each was a single newssheet printed on the back of unused wallpaper.

In the case of the Daily Citizen, however, it was not only the use of wallpaper that signified the instability of news and printing in the South. The Confederates surrendered Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, two days after the most recent issue of the Daily Citizen. Swords fled the city, and when Union forces entered the offices of the newspaper they found the type for the latest issue still standing. They replaced two-thirds of the last column with other content, most of it from other type already set, but added a note explaining the appearance of a new edition of the July 2 issue of the paper:

Two days bring about great changes, The banner of the Union floats over Vicksburg. Gen. Grant has “caught the rabbit;” he has dined in Vicksburg, and he did bring his dinner with him. The “Citizen” lives to see it. For the last time it appears on “Wall-paper.” No more will it eulogize the luxury of mule-meat and fricassed kitten—urge Southern warriors to such diet never-more. This is the last wall-paper edition, and is, excepting this note, from the types as we found them. It will be valuable hereafter as a curiosity.

It did indeed become valuable. The AAS collections include an original July 2 issue and multiple copies of the July 4 reprint. One of the issues is also accompanied by a handwritten note identifying its provenance and authenticity. 

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) would become a prominent Patriot printer during the American Revolution and eventually one of the wealthiest men in the United States, but at sixteen he illegally left his apprenticeship in Boston with a poor printer named Zechariah Fowle (1724-76) to learn his trade in London. He never made it to London and instead found himself in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1765.

In Halifax he worked for the town’s only printer, Anthony Henry (1734-1800), who turned out to be inept at his business and soon left the newspaper, the Halifax Gazette, in the care of Thomas. Thomas, like many printers at this time, hated the Stamp Act, as it was harmful to business. During the several months he stayed in Halifax, he published many articles against the act, printed the tax stamp upside down, and even created images of the devil attacking the stamp, before he resorted to cutting all the stamps off of his supply of paper. According to Thomas, these protests “made no trifling bustle in the place,” including causing the Gazette to briefly lose its government patronage.

The two images from the Halifax Gazette shown here illustrate some of the ways Thomas spoke out against the Stamp Act. The first, the front page of the December 12-19, 1765, issue of the paper, replicates the Pennsylvania Journal, which came to Halifax via a sailing vessel and featured black mourning bars and a skull and cross bones illustration to signify the potential death of the paper due to the Stamp Act. The second shows a woodcut of the devil attacking the Stamp Act, which appeared on the second page of the issue for February 6-13, 1766. This woodcut was created by Thomas himself.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View larger images]]> In colonial America, newspapers were delivered to their readers in a variety of ways. In the cities, customers often picked up their papers at the printing office. In the countryside, post riders delivered newspapers. Having free access to the postal service was so valuable that newspaper publishers competed to be named postmaster in their cities. Newspaper copies destined for other cities might be sent by stagecoach or even coastal schooner. As cities grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, another feature of the local delivery system became more common: the paperboy. And along with the paperboy came the paperboy’s annual plea for a holiday tip.

This 1770 broadside “carrier’s address” is a “Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year” verse printed for the carriers of the Massachusetts Spy: “Kind Sirs! your gen’rous bounty show, / few shillings on your Lad bestow.” 

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> John Burt (1716-75) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College in 1736. At the time he kept his diary, he was reading theology with a local minister in Boston. He later accepted a call to the pulpit in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spent his career there until his death. Burt’s diary for 1737 is written into an interleaved almanac, the same issue of the Ames Almanack that Thomas Prince used for his diary that year. Like Prince, Burt intermingled personal, professional, and public events in his entries. He wrote about dinners and church services as well as fires, accidents, and deaths—and the market riot in March, during which a mob tore down several of the city’s market sheds. Some of those events, such as the fire at John Brocas’s woodworking shop and the market riot, were reported in the local newspapers and discussed in sermons that Burt attended. At times, Burt probably learned about an event before it was written up in the newspapers; at other times, he may have gleaned his information from the papers.

Although the Prince diary and the Burt diary include some of the same events, they also have variations. As a young man not yet part of Boston’s elite, Burt had a slightly different perspective than Prince on the news of the day. In his entry for March 4, for example, Burt writes about a salacious bit of news he got by word of mouth: “I heard that there was a whore house kept by one Green broke & a list of those that frequented it carried to Major Savage. There were in it some of the greatest Gentlemen to live in town.” Brief reports of this news event did appear in a couple of the Boston newspapers, but without mention of a list of the brothel’s patrons. The event did not appear at all in Prince’s diary, though Prince and most of the people of Boston undoubtedly knew about it via the age-old news medium of gossip.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> View more pages from this diary]]> The New England Weekly Journal was founded in 1727 as a literary paper, along the lines of the Spectator in London and New England Courant in Boston, the newspaper that launched the career of Benjamin Franklin. But the Weekly Journal was more aligned with the local religious establishment than the Courant had been. One of its founders and an occasional contributor was Thomas Prince, who cared more about providential news and religious revival than the clever satire that characterized much of the Courant’s content. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted much attention to the earthquake of 1727 and to the revivals that began in the 1730s at Northampton, led by Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). The Weekly Journal’s printers were Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769) and Timothy Green (1703-63), who also published many sermons and pamphlets on religious revivals. Kneeland was a member of Prince’s church.

By 1737 the New England Weekly Journal had become less literary and more newsy, with the usual assortment of European news culled from London newspapers, items from other American colonies, and local Boston news. The news often recounted events that seemed to carry providential meaning. For example, the Weekly Journal devoted more attention than other Boston papers to the execution of Hugh Henderson. Henderson’s jailhouse repentance was the central theme of the newspaper’s coverage and of a sermon and poem written for the event, all published by Kneeland and Green. During the brutally cold winter of 1737, the newspaper carried many short news items from Boston and from around the country about fires and deaths. This March 8, 1737, issue has an item about the fire in John Brocas’s woodworking shop, as well as a preview story about an upcoming town meeting, always an important venue for the making and sharing of news. At the March town meeting, the citizens of Boston were expected to discuss two vital issues of public policy made more serious by the severe winter cold: “some more Effectual method for preventing the Danger of Fire by Chimneys” and “Providing the Town with Wood.”

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