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The oldest of the five newspapers in Boston in 1737 was the Boston Weekly News-Letter. Founded in 1704, it was also the oldest newspaper in America. The proprietor of the News-Letter after 1732 was John Draper (d. 1762), who, like most newspaper…

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…

Getting news by telegraph and railroad was much more difficult for Southern newspapers than Northern papers. This was true in general, but even more so when General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into Northern territory.…

Not all news stories during the Civil War concerned battle outcomes, troop movements, and casualty lists. One ongoing news story—and one that became even more pressing as the war drew to a close—was the emotional and physical wreckage of returning…

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…

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…

One genre of news broadside in colonial America, quite different in quality from the elegantly printed government proclamation, was the confession or “last speech” of a condemned criminal. These were typically small sheets, printed quickly on cheap…

In many cases, visual resources not only provided a means by which to depict a news event, but also a way to interpret that event. This lithograph, produced by Currier & Ives, shows the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment fighting its way…

An important category of newspapers in antebellum America was the organizational paper. Every religious or reform movement seemed to have its national and state associations and every association its newspaper. That certainly was true of the…

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…