Thomas Prince (1687-1758), the senior minister of Old South Church in Boston from 1718 until his death in 1758, was a leading American proponent of the new natural sciences and the British Enlightenment. Yet he was a theological conservative who hoped to preserve the traditional Puritan doctrine of God’s active role in nature and in New England history and life. Many of his sermons and other writings were, in a sense, a species of journalism: like the work of Increase (1639-1723) and Cotton Mather (1663-1728) before him, they were descriptions of and meditations upon current events. In these sermons, he presented what he took to be scientific disquisitions on how God could guide natural and human events in a way that was consistent with the laws of nature. In addition to sermons and histories, Prince also created, in collaboration with his son, the first successful magazine in America. The Christian History, launched in 1743, reported the news of the religious revivals of the so-called Great Awakening.

This Prince sermon is an account of the Siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745. It is an example of news as divine providence. Prince argues that the victory of the New England expeditionary force was the result of natural occurrences and forces, yet it was divinely ordained. The patterns of events—“trains of coincidence,” he calls them—revealed the hand of God. “Some extraordinary Events,” he writes, “without being properly term’d miraculous, have such lively Characters of their being the Doings of GOD.” Though Prince attributes the New Englanders’ success at Louisbourg to God, he also lavishes praise on Massachusetts Governor William Shirley (1694-1771), who had organized the expedition. For loyal English subjects such as Thomas Prince, English governors and monarchs frequently enacted the will of God. 

Click the image below to view a portion of this sermon.

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> In colonial America the surest way for a printer to achieve financial stability was to secure government contracts for printing the laws and other official documents. Usually, the government printer also ran his newspaper as a kind of sycophantic “court” gazette. Some government printings, such as proclamations, were important elements of the colonial news media. Official proclamations might announce a new policy or regulation, a day of thanksgiving for a military victory, a denunciation of criminals or rioters, or even the prosecution of the publisher of a seditious newspaper. Proclamations illustrate the blending of print culture and oral culture in the realm of news. They were quite elegantly printed, and copies were posted in conspicuous public places. They were also designed to be read aloud to the gathered citizens of the towns.

This governor’s proclamation is an official announcement regarding the siege of the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. It was printed by John Draper (d. 1762) in Boston, who was the longtime printer to the Massachusetts governor and publisher of the Boston News-Letter. In 1745 Governor William Shirley (1694-1771) was the chief promoter of the Cape Breton expedition, and this broadside proclaims a new recruitment effort by Shirley’s government. The proclamation prominently displays the governor’s name and coat-of-arms. The aim of the proclamation was to spread the news of the government’s recruitment plans throughout the colony. Copies were printed for every military company in Massachusetts, and officers were directed to read the proclamation to their assembled militiamen. 

]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> Biographers and historians agree that Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was the best journalist in colonial America and his Pennsylvania Gazette the best newspaper. Founded in 1728, the Gazette was the second newspaper to be produced in Philadelphia. In 1729, the twenty-three-year-old Franklin and a partner, Hugh Meredith (ca. 1697- ca. 1749), bought the struggling paper and quickly turned it into a well-written, well-edited, and well-printed newspaper. In format, Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was like other colonial American newspapers. The emphasis was on news, not literary or political essays, and most of that news was copied from European papers. But Franklin had a knack for selecting, editing, and rewriting. And, if his autobiography is to be believed, the Gazette “prov’d in a few Years extreamly profitable.”

This 1745 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette is typical in some ways, atypical in others. As usual, the paper is filled with European news of war and diplomacy. But in 1745 some important war news came to Philadelphia via Boston. Under a “Boston” heading, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported the big news of the day: the siege of the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, mounted mainly by New Englanders. This issue of the Gazette is quite unusual in that it has two extra pages and a woodcut map, a “PLAN of the Town and Harbour of LOUISBOURGH.” This map, probably cut by Franklin himself, marks the first illustrated news story in American journalism. Yet in the midst of much serious war news, a bit of Franklinesque fluff also appears: “They write from Paris, that the Diamonds of the Lords and Ladies of the Court at Versailles, at the grand Ball on the 25th of last Month, were valued at 250 Millions, which is near 12 Millions Sterling.”


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]]> AAS Catalog Record]]> The first newspaper in New York was the New-York Gazette, founded in 1725 by William Bradford (1663-1752). The New-York Weekly Journal appeared eight years later, and from its beginning it was more than a business competitor to the Gazette; it was a political adversary. In the 1730s, New York was the most politically fractious of the British American colonies, and the Weekly Journal represented the faction of Chief Justice Lewis Morris (1671-1746) against Governor William Cosby (1690-1736). The printer of the Journal, John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), is remembered and celebrated because it was he, not the actual writers of the paper’s political essays, who ended up being prosecuted for seditious libel at the behest of the governor in 1734. Zenger’s acquittal became a cause célèbre in the history of press freedom in colonial America and beyond.

After his acquittal, Zenger made his paper less an organ of political faction and more a standard newspaper. The 1745 issue seen here is an example of the Journal in the last year of Zenger’s editorship; he died the next year. It illustrates how war—in this case, King George’s War—could thoroughly dominate the news. In 1745 a New England force was mounting a siege of the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island at the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Journal reported the news of this important expedition mainly by gathering news from Boston, much as Benjamin Franklin was doing in Philadelphia. This war with France and the later Seven Years’ War of the 1750s and 1760s did not produce an American patriotism in the British colonies. But they did produce among the colonies a sense of shared American interest and identity. From New England down the Atlantic seaboard, newspapers shared and reprinted North American news for people who were beginning to think of themselves as Americans.

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