Browse Items (116 total)

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Although tintypes and ambrotypes were both used to capture images of soldiers, by far the most popular form soldier portraits took were cartes-de-visites. Unlike the former two processes, whose glass and metal foundations made them delicate, bulky,…

Charles Carleton Coffin (1823-96) was one of a dozen or so battlefield correspondents whose work during the Civil War made them into something new in American journalism: celebrity reporters. Writing under the penname “Carleton” for the…