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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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Public executions had long been popular news events in Europe, and they fit well into the news environment of Puritan New England. They were sensational, which appealed to the voyeurism of audiences, but they were also morally instructive, which…

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…

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…

Throughout the colonial period, almanacs were the best-selling product of the American press. The almanac was one of the first imprints of the Cambridge Press—the first press in British North America—in the 1640s; by the 1760s tens of…