Browse Items (116 total)

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet is a reader that was published in 1846 for the purpose of being sold at the Anti-Slavery Fair in Philadelphia. The fair was organized by the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) and raised money for abolitionism…

The Soldier’s Letter was a military camp newspaper published in Kansas City, Missouri, and Fort Riley, Kansas.It was issued by the Second Colorado Cavalry and edited by Private Oliver F. Wallace with contributions by other enlisted men and a few…

By the beginning of the Civil War, photography had been around for over twenty years, but in many ways it was still a new technology. Only recently had the new albumen process, in the form of cartes-de-visites and stereographs, made photography…

This large broadside, printed by R. M. Edwards of Boston in 1855, features woodcuts portraying scenes from the life of Anthony Burns (1834-62), a former fugitive and then freed slave whose story sparked fierce abolitionist reaction throughout…

Diary and journal keeping was a common practice during the Victorian era and particularly during the Civil War, by both men and women, North and South. Unlike the generally terse and dispassionate diaries of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century…

With the ubiquity and voracious appetite for news throughout the country, it is no surprise that the publication of amateur newspapers became a popular hobby in the nineteenth century. Though the first amateur newspaper in the United States is…

The British version of the events leading to and including the Battles of Lexington and Concord is presented in this broadside. The calm tone of the language and the lack of any graphic images is an intentional attempt to downplay the significance of…

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…

Cincinnati had a powerful pro-slavery faction that published the Cincinnati Post and Anti-Abolitionist, edited by L. Greely Curtiss, from 1841 to 1842. By 1842 the paper boasted that it had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the West.…

While most colonial newspapers had circulations of between 300 and 600, theMassachusetts Spyhad a circulation of 3,500 from subscribers throughout the thirteen colonies, making it the most popular American newspaper at the time. Designed specifically…