Browse Items (116 total)

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…

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…

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…

Harper Brothers publishing house in New York set the standard for illustrated magazines with the inauguration of its very popular Harper’s Monthly Magazine in1850, a staid literary magazine aimed at a broad but genteel reading public. This…

Harper’s Weekly became such a mainstay of popular news culture during the Civil War, that the newspaper could make references to its own popularity within its illustrations. Copies of Harper’s are among the presents Santa Claus is…