Browse Items (116 total)

The cheapness of new printing techniques and technology meant that now not only could most households afford to decorate their homes with individual prints, but also that all kinds of ephemera—those items meant to be used and thrown away—could be…

Public readings of the newly minted Declaration of Independence took place in taverns, churches, town greens, or anywhere else people could gather. This July 27, 1776, issue of the Virginia Gazette records a public reading of the Declaration that…

This issue of the Virginia Gazette includes a summary of a meeting held to discuss resolutions with the representatives from Richmond County who would be attending the First Virginia Convention on August 1, 1774. (There would eventually be five…

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 May 6, 1775, issue of John Dixon (d. 1791) and William Hunter’s Virginia Gazette illustrates how news of Lexington and Concord spread throughout the colonies.On the first page in the middle column are extracts of letters from Boston about…

The royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage (1719-87), responded to the flurry of news reports of the Battles of Lexington and Concord by sending official accounts of the confrontation to high officials in the adjoining colonies. He…

Newspapers in foreign languages catering to the growing immigrant populations popped up throughout the antebellum era. They appeared in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Hawaiian. Chinese…

This is the first volume of the Horseneck Truth-Teller, and Gossip’s Journal, an example of a popular genre of newspaper new in the antebellum era: the gossip and moral-exposure paper. The publisher was given as Diedrich van Tod, but it was…

As the country grew in the antebellum years, so did the diversity of its population. This diversity, which included linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences, was reflected in the types of newspapers that appeared. This paper, The Truth Teller,…

As the number of newspapers grew throughout the United States, so did the frequency of publication. The first daily newspaper in America appeared in Philadelphia in 1783, and by 1800 Philadelphia had six dailies, New York had five, Baltimore three,…