Browse Items (116 total)

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…

In New England, even in the age of newspapers, which began modestly in 1704 with the launch of the Boston News-Letter, the sermon remained a vital public communication medium for the discussion of news. Though most sermons, especially Sunday sermons,…

The most formal medium of news dissemination in colonial New England was the government proclamation, issued by the governor or other high official and printed elegantly in broadside form. Proclamations often announced special days of thanksgiving…

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…

This illustration depicts an American Tract Society (ATS) colporteur at work. The term “colporteur” was coined in eighteenth-century France as a name for itinerant peddlers of books, especially religious books. In America, the term came…

The national Sunday school movement, like other religious and reform movements in the early nineteenth century, was fundamentally a publishing enterprise. The goal was to organize and support Sunday schools, but the chief means to that end was the…

One of the few battlefield reporters to cover the Civil War from beginning to end—from Bull Run to the fall of Richmond—was C.C. Coffin (1823-96) of the Boston Journal. After the Battle of Gettysburg, when the outcome was assured by late…