Browse Items (116 total)

Stereography, an early form of three-dimensional photography, was a major vehicle for popular education and entertainment in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Otherwise known as the stereogram, stereopticon, or stereo view, the stereograph…

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…

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.…

The Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper published by Native Americans. In 1825 the Cherokee Council pledged $1,500 for the purchase of a printing press and type; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions also pledged assistance.…

On November 10, 1860, after a decade of political division and just four days after Lincoln’s election, South Carolina called a secession convention for the following month. Considered by virtue of timing to be the first Confederate imprint, this…

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…

In 1690, a recent immigrant to Boston, Benjamin Harris (d. 1716), decided the time was right to launch a newspaper. In the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the royal regime change in England, colonists longed for news from home. Harris,…

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…

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…

This broadside, printed in Boston in April 1773, contains the text of a letter from the Virginia House of Burgesses informing Boston of the creation of a standing Committee of Correspondence and assuring the New Englanders of Virginia’s…