Browse Items (116 total)

Maps were one tool people used to make sense of the war and visualize the places where their loved ones were fighting, places most of them had never seen. Though few newspapers outside of the illustrated press carried graphics at this time, many…

This paper is an example of a presidential campaign newspaper, a form that became very popular during the 1840s and 1850s. This one supports the election of William Henry Harrison (1773-1841). The hotly contested presidential election of 1840…

Thomas Prince (1687-1758), born in Sandwich, Massachusetts, was a leading public figure in Boston as senior minister of Old South Church from 1718 until his death. During that forty-year career, Prince was an avid news consumer as well as an…

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…

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,…

The national Sunday school movement, like other religious and reform movements in the early nineteenth century, was fundamentally a publishing enterprise. The goal was to organize and support Sunday schools, but the chief means to that end was the…

As with many other reform movements of the day, temperance activists made use of a variety of print media to further their cause, including the long-popular genre of almanacs. It became common for antebellum reform organizations to publish almanacs…

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,…

Before the Civil War, Southerners were also consuming the popular Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. After the commencement of the war, however, readers in the Confederate states were cut off from these papers. In…

While big dailies were beginning to dominate the newspaper markets of the urban centers in the first half of the nineteenth century, smaller newspapers began to pop up in more rural areas. These small local papers carried news from around the…