Browse Items (116 total)

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…

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.…

The Boston News-Letter was the first newspaper in America to survive beyond its first issue. Indeed, it survived for seventy-two years as a fixture of the Boston publishing scene. The founding editor and publisher was John Campbell (1653-1728), who…

The first newspaper in America south of the Potomac River was the Virginia Gazette, founded by William Parks (1699-1750) in 1736. Parks, who had previously operated a print shop and published a newspaper in Maryland, brought printing to Williamsburg…

This color lithograph published by E. B. & E. C. Kellogg of Hartford, Connecticut, and George Whiting of New York City dates from 1861 or 1862. It is believed to be the first time that the elephant and donkey appear together depicting the…

Scrapbooks were a common way for people in both the North and the South to process and keep a record of the war. Thus, they provide insights into what people were reading, what they were feeling, and what kinds of information they found important. A…

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, established in 1855,was the first successful pictorial newspaper in the United States. Before immigrating to the United States in 1848, Frank Leslie (born Henry Carter; 1821-80) had worked for six years in…

Though much of the imagery surrounding African Americans was full of stereotypes and caricatures throughout the war, even in the North, positive depictions of African Americans began to appear more often as the war progressed. Though some unofficial…