Colonial Wiliamsburg Librarian Juleigh Clark describes her research into the events described in Revolutionary-War-era newspapers, both in articles and advertisements.
Note: this podcast is no longer available. To view a transcript of the original podcast, click here.
Pete Stinely, a printer at Colonial Williamsburg, talks about the work of printing according to colonial-era practices.
Dennis Watson, interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, looks at the life and trade of the historical figure he interprets, Alex Purdie, publisher of The Virginia Gazette.
Political pressure and personal bias have hounded American journalists since the first newspapers were printed. Interpreter Dennis Watson talks about the Virginia Gazette.
In this podcast from the Bowery Boys, Greg Young narrates the history of New York's Puck Building, built to house the offices of the turn-of-the-century periodical Puck Magazine.
Transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants between 1736 and 1803 can be browsed or search on this website. The runaways are primarily from Virginia, but also come from states along the Eastern seaboard and locations abroad. Materials include ads placed by owners and overseers as well as those placed by sheriffs and other governmental officials for captured or suspected runaway slaves. Additional advertisements announce runaway servants, sailors, and military deserters.
"Exploring Advertisements" offers browse, search, and full-text search functions, as well as maps and timelines for viewing the geographic locations of slaves. The site also provides documents on runaways—including letters, other newspaper materials, literature and narratives, and several dozen official records, such as laws, county records, and House of Burgess journals. Information on the currency and clothing of the time, a gazetteer with seven maps of the region, and a 13-title bibliography are also available.
How did the news work in 1900?
In 1900, the news reached the public all in print. The newspapers were at the height of their power and influence. They were inexpensive and ubiquitous throughout the country. It was their Golden Age, before newsreels, commercial radio, television, or the internet. The publishers and editors of the largest metropolitan daily newspapers of that time had enormous political and social influence. They became celebrities in their own right—including men such as Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Medill—who inherited the same notoriety that had attached itself in the preceding generation to Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and Charles Anderson Dana.
George Rowell's American Newspaper Directory for 1900 and the Pettingill Advertising Agency's National Newspaper Directory and Gazetteer show that about 40 newspapers (at least in their Sunday editions) had a circulation of over 100,000, and that the largest newspapers were generally clustered in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and St. Louis. Competition for readers (and consequently for advertising revenue), especially among these largest newspapers, was fierce.
Rowell's Directory calculated that there were more than 20,000 different newspapers published in the United States (including dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies) in 1900. Rowell's detailed listings show a large number of small newspapers serving even tiny hamlets and rural communities. They also show that a very large proportion of the regular papers clearly labeled themselves politically, either as Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Socialist. There were also many special interest newspapers—published in German or Yiddish or Swedish, for example, or published in quasi-magazine format, perhaps as infrequently as monthly, for such niche markets as women (fashion or homemaking); farmers; gardeners; Sunday School pupils; or members of particular occupations, fraternal or ethnic organizations, or religious denominations. Many of these mixed feature articles with news of the day. Typical of these were Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Magazine.
In 1900, newspapers shared news with one another. Papers across the country had long had the practice of exchanging copies of their papers by giving subscriptions to the editors of other papers upon request. Editors would scan through all the papers they received and would often clip articles and reprint them in their next editions (most often with attribution). Beginning with the formation of the Associated Press around 1850, newspapers began forming news-gathering cooperatives, whereby stories investigated by and reported in some of the largest newspapers, like The New York Herald and The Chicago Tribune, would be cabled to affiliated newspapers, which would run them simultaneously. By 1900 there were a handful of such cooperatives. Individual newspapers, depending on their financial resources, also had bureaus or single correspondents in cities around the country and abroad, and assigned reporters to travel to cover stories far afield.
Many cities were served by at least 2 competing daily newspapers—with the competitors each sympathetic to a different political party or published at the opposite end of the day. Each edition typically operated on a 24-hour news cycle, which may not seem long, but it is leisurely compared to the schedules of radio and TV news broadcasters, or reporters working on internet news sites today, who report and then update stories virtually from the time the news first breaks.
Compared with broadcast journalism—or with the truncated editions of newspapers of today—the news cycle of 1900 often allowed reporters to develop their stories with more background and perspective. Compared to newspapers of the 1850s, however, readers in 1900 often complained of how reporters' and editors' reliance on the constantly chattering telegraph and telephone had seemingly turned the assembled news into a large unfermented mash, where the trivial and the important sat side by side. This had only increased by 1900, and was amplified by a literary fashion, which both affected and was affected by journalistic writing, toward realism and the reporting or muckraking of the corrupt, the sordid, and the everyday. As a result, the tone of the news—or, one might say, the objects that the newspapers felt called upon to report—had begun to change.
Joseph Pulitzer at The New York World and William Randolph Hearst at The New York Journal had begun to deploy teams of investigative reporters who tagged along on police calls and interviewed and reported the observations of bystanders and victims. They aggressively pumped witnesses at the scene and followed their own leads into back alleys and to criminal informants, very much in the style of detectives. This was a novel way of getting a news story. Many people felt that a line of propriety was being crossed, although it certainly made "good copy," in the sense that it sold well. Paradoxically, perhaps (because of the assumed moral judgment that motivates such muckraking), newspaper editors and publishers at the time made a point of disavowing any moral dimension to news writing and insisted that they were simply bringing to light things that were hidden.
In 1900, the Spanish-American War had recently ended. It was around that conflict that Pulitzer and Hearst pushed an aggressive array of journalistic tactics to an extreme. The New York Press accused them of what it called "yellow journalism," informally linking their trafficking in exaggeration, rumors, lurid imagery, and sensationalism (as well as clandestine tactics to file stories that bypassed military censors on the telegraph lines) to the mischievous "Yellow Kid" comic character that ran in both papers.
American Newspaper Directory, New York, George P. Rowell, publisher, vol. 32, issue 1 (March 1900).
Arthur Reed Kimball, "The Invasion of Journalism," The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 86, issue 513 (July 1900): 119-125.
National Newspaper Directory and Gazetteer, 1899, Pettingill & Co., Boston and New York.
H. L. Mencken, Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Frank Michael O'Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 (New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran, 1918).
H. Elton Smith, "Modern Journalism," Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, San Francisco, vol. 15, issue 89 (May 1890): 474-476.
David R. Spencer, The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
Grant Squires, "Experiences of a War Censor," The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 83, issue 497 (March 1899): 425-432.
Image:
"The mention of Mr. Tagg's name in the social column attracts some gentlemen of the press: Mr. Tagg gracefully submits to an interview," drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, 1903, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Bringing together a wealth of material from libraries, archives, and museums, this website examines the history and culture of the state of Georgia. Legal materials include more than 17,000 state government documents from 1994 to the present, updated daily, and a complete set of Acts and Resolutions from 1799 to 1995. "Southeastern Native American Documents" provides approximately 2,000 letters, legal documents, military orders, financial papers, and archaeological images from 17301842. Materials from the Civil War era include a soldier's diary and two collections of letters.
The site provides a collection of 80 full-text, word-searchable versions of books from the early 19th century to the 1920s and three historic newspapers. There are approximately 2,500 political cartoons from 1946-1982; Jimmy Carter's diaries; photographs of African Americans from Augusta during the late 19th century; and 1,500 architectural and landscape photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Increasingly, people are turning to online outlets for their daily news (see Pew Research Center’s State of the Media Report). In fact, when I watch students interact with newspapers, they almost seem to treat newspapers as quaint. The reality is that newspapers remain great records of history, and today’s newspapers continue to reflect society's concerns and values. Social studies teachers should continue to teach students how newspapers are laid out and how effective news stories are written.
Consider putting an old newspaper in the hands of students. It does not need to be a special newspaper to hold significant information for students to analyze. While it would be neat for students to hold the front page of the Washington Post from the day Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon or Pearl Harbor was attacked, “atmosphere” newspapers can be just as illuminating and cheaper to obtain. An “atmosphere” newspaper can come from the era of World War I, World War II, or the space race, but not have a specific notable headline. These newspapers can be bought online from sites like eBay or online dealers for less than five dollars, more for older newspapers.
If laying hands on an actual old newspaper seems unnecessary, there are plenty of sites that will help you find articles related to your desired era of study. Chronicling America is part of the Library of Congress’s collection and contains searchable newspaper pages from 1860 to 1922. The Google News Archive contains a searchable database of many newspapers, largely from the 20th and 21st centuries. Finally, this site contains a great collection of Civil War-era copies of Harper’s Weekly.
In addition, many newspapers like the New York Times maintain a searchable archive of old articles, some viewable for free and others for a fee. However, many of these same types of big newspaper archives can be searched using subscription services from your school library.
While there are lots of ways to use your local newspaper in the classroom, there are a few sites that stand out for bringing newspapers from around the world to your computer.
Newspapermap.com displays a clickable map of available online newspapers from around the world. The site also offers to translate foreign newspapers. I've found that students get a sense of population distribution in the world and language distribution using this map.
The Newseum has a cool map that displays the day’s front pages from around the world. This can provide students an opportunity to see what makes news in different parts of the world and different parts of the United States.
In a history classroom, students could compare a newspaper today with a newspaper from 25, 50, or 100 years ago. This comparison can be a jumping-off point to several important conversations with students, perhaps even ending with predictions of what news will look like 25 years from now. Likely when students compare newspapers of today with newspapers of the past they will find that there was more paper dedicated to a newspaper (paper costs have increased over time, condensing newspaper size). Students will also find more wire stories, more local news, and more color printing in the newspapers of today.
Another lesson idea to help students practice summarizing main ideas is to cover up the headlines of a few articles and have students develop their own. Students can share their headlines aloud or post headlines anonymously on a wall to gauge understanding as a whole class.
To better understand the past, perhaps students could categorize articles from an old newspaper. Students could categorize according to bias vs. unbiased articles (or categorize by different types of bias), or articles dealing with the federal government vs. state government. This largely depends on the lesson objective.
Finally, students could rewrite newspaper articles with new information or using additional eyewitness accounts. By rewriting articles students are forced to detect bias or corroborate additional sources with their assigned newspaper article. For effect, students can create their own newspaper clippings using this site.
Newspapers offer students a unique glimpse into the past and, alongside new technology, offer fun ways to better understand past, present, and future.
Historian John Buescher has more suggestions for finding archived newspaper articles online, and our Website Reviews can guide you to even more options. Professor John Lee reminds readers that students (and teachers) may have scrapbooked newspaper articles in their homes, as well.
And don't feel limited to the articles! A close reading of a newspaper illustration, photograph, or cartoon can reveal just as much, as 4th-grade teacher Stacy Hoeflich demonstrates.
Barbara Clark Smith asks five questions of a 1775 newspaper article published by a Patriot press in Providence, RI:
This is an article that was in the newspapers, the Patriot press in the 18th century. I tend to find these normally by looking through newspapers, which are generally on microfilm or in special collections. This one, however, I found in a specific collection, which is called the American Archives, edited by Peter Force. And what Peter Force did, in the early 19th century, was go and collect records from newspapers, from state papers, committee papers, and gather them together in several volumes and publish them as part of forming a documentary history of the American Revolution. So, this is a report that appeared in the colonial press. I'm not sure exactly where, but my guess is Boston or Hartford. Possibly more than one press because they tended to copy reports from each other. That's how they got their news, from other newspapers. And it's a report from Providence, RI.
The reason I'm interested in this sort of document is that I'm trying to get a kind of "close to the ground" look at the American Revolution. I want to know what the Patriot movement was like. The movement from, say, 1765 through the Revolution of people protesting parliamentary taxation and legislation. And I want to know less about the leading men who met in conventions and congresses, and who petitioned the King. I know a fair amount about them. I want to know about people on the local ground, ordinary people, women as well as men, and I want to know what was it like for them to become Patriots. And the questions I would bring to looking at these reports and newspapers would include: What is this telling me about ordinary people's participation? Not just what ideas might they bring to joining the Revolution, or becoming a Patriot. But also what practices, what things did they have to do to be a Patriot? How do you practice being a Patriot? What does it really mean to join this movement? And what's it like, again, not in the official bodies that we think of as Patriot leaders, but kind of on the local ground, in this case in Providence, RI.
The first thing I was struck by was actually the last sentence, this image of this "Son of Liberty" going around the shops with his lampblack, which is the soot from oil lamps, a kind of black carbon soot. And unpainting the word tea. It certainly makes me think of more famous events, like the Boston Tea Party. Although that's a real destruction of other people's property, they throw tea that doesn't belong to them into the harbor in Boston. But this seems sort of a smaller offering of one's own tea. But nonetheless, something of a gathering, a really dramatic gathering, where Patriots are expressing their political views.
Elsewhere in the second paragraph it says a great number of inhabitants—you'd really like to know, how many, how many that is compared to all of the inhabitants of Providence. They mention specifically some worthy women. So we know in this case the word inhabitants includes women, which sometimes it might or sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't specifically mention anyone else. We get the impression though that this is not limited to people who were qualified to vote. Certainly if women are there, it's not limited to qualified town voters. And possibly therefore there were men and boys present—apprentices, servants, slaves, sailors, any number of people who would normally not be voting and acting politically in that way, even in a town meeting. But who could attend a marketplace to purchase things, or in this case to refuse to purchase or to give up things or to observe. So it's an interesting characterization.
One thing that I think is intriguing too is there's an argument about tea in this. It's not just a description saying people came to burn their tea. It describes tea for you. That it's needless, we don't need it. It's been detrimental to our liberty and interest and health. And that's intriguing because you can see the logic by which it's detrimental to Patriots' liberty and interest. They don't want to pay taxes on it. They don't think Parliament should be taxing this. Health is another question, and it's interesting that the Patriots raised this issue of how its supposed to be unhealthy just when Britain puts a tax on it, that's not really a common thought in the 18th century—that tea is unhealthy. In fact, people take it in part for medicinal purposes. But here it's really argued for the reader that it's needless, you simply don't need to have it.
There's other information here that you can begin to pick up. That in addition to throwing the tea in the fire, they throw in some newspapers and a printed copy of a speech by Lord North that they disapprove of. And you can go and track down what was Lord North probably speaking about. Rivington's paper, a New York paper, Rivington's a loyalist, and he's arguing on behalf of parliamentary power. Mills and Hicks. So it's interesting they throw those newspapers in the fire as well. So it's not merely getting rid of the tea. It's all that English stuff.
I think one thing to notice about it is this isn't the kind of newspaper report we would expect, that we would get, of this happening. Even though it's written in the third person by someone describing it as if he or she was there, very authoritative, "this happened." It offers opinions in places where we might expect that you'd interview someone. It doesn't interview Jane Doe and have her say, "Well, I'm really cheerful to be throwing my tea in the fire, because I don't need this noxious weed." It's the reporter telling you and the reporter using language which testifies to his—and I think we can probably use the male pronoun here—position. In reading these it's tricky. You will sometimes read pieces like this which talk about true friends of the country and lovers of freedom. And you'll discover the writer is talking about the Loyalists, the Tories, because, of course, they think too that they're the true lovers of America and freedom. So you have to sometimes read for a while to figure that out. In this case it's pretty straight forward, since they're burning Tory newspapers and throwing away tea and supporting the Sons of Liberty.
I'd really like to know more. What happened in organizing this? How did this come about? Who planned it and what was it like to attend and to observe? For example, alright, at noon you hear that you were invited to testify your good disposition to the Patriot cause by bringing your tea. Well, what does it mean if you don't feel like doing it? Does that mean if I don't bring my tea, my neighbors will, from here on out, know that I don't have a good disposition towards the Patriot cause. Does that label me a Tory who is sympathetic to Britain or to Parliamentary power?
Similarly, this point that there appeared great cheerfulness in destroying the tea. And that these worthy women made free will offerings of their stocks of the tea. Well, that's a nice description, but you do wonder about those women who maybe didn't want to burn their tea. None of that is covered. If there're women who said, "Not me, I'm keeping my tea," you don't find that out here.
And finally, I think the real clue to the question of coercion or not comes in the last sentence describing a spirited "Son of Liberty" going along the street with his brush and lampblack and unpainting the word "Tea" on the shop signs. Well, one wonders what the merchants, whose shops those were, where presumably they sold tea, thought about that. And it strikes me, that we don't have any information here, did he get permission from these merchants ahead of time? Or was this an act that put the merchants in a position where they would have to become quite unpopular with the Patriots if they decided to continue selling tea?
One of the first things I'd do is keep by me a dictionary so I could look up words, particularly a dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary that has 18th-century meanings. Because often there's a word that will have changed in meaning. One example, they use the term, "the true interest of America." The term "interesting" which people in the 18th century would use to describe a situation, they say "that's an interesting situation." It doesn't mean, "I'm kind of interested in it intellectually," it means it involves people's economic interest, okay. They mean "interest" exactly in that sense almost all the time. And there are other examples, so one thing would be, don't be too far away from a good dictionary and preferably one that can tell you how things were used in the 18th century.
I'd certainly look for any references to people or events and make sure I knew what those were. Look in the history book, see if I could find out who's being referred to, who they assume everyone knows about. I'd go real carefully through the sentences, because 18th-century language, often the sentences are very long, with lots of different clauses which is complicated for us to understand today. And, certainly with newspapers at this time period, where they are either Patriot or Tory newspapers, I'd be looking for the point of view of the writer. In this case, the point of view is someone who's in favor the Patriots. So, that gives us the last thing which is I'd look for what isn't here. And in the case of a Patriot point of view well, we don't hear about anybody in Providence who disagreed with this. And there, we don't know if there was or was not someone. That's simply absent from this.
One is I would try to contextualize the immediate incident that's being described here, this particular event in Providence, RI. And, the way that I might do that is by looking at other events taking place in Providence, by supporting this document with other descriptions of the event. I would hope I could find in letters or diaries a description of this tea burning that took place in the marketplace. And I might particularly hope I could find a Tory, or a Loyalist point of view, somebody who was upset that this happened. And I'd go and look in diaries and letters around the time of March 2nd, and following, look for that.
The second is, after looking at that particular incident, look more broadly at other places where this took place. And it turns out if you just follow in the newspapers, and read diaries and letters from the time, tea burnings are not uncommon in 1775. A variety of them take place in New Hampshire and New Haven, certainly in the New England area, and on into the middle colonies, you can find examples of gatherings like this. So this kind of event is a second context.
The third context, I'd look at the kind of document this is, which is a report in a newspaper. And think a little bit about reading other newspapers, reading to see if this is typical or atypical. I think its reasonably typical. There are a variety of these similar reports of Patriot events in different newspapers of this time period. And to know a little something about how people are reading this. We know that newspaper subscriptions are skyrocketing at this time. And also that people are reading them in taverns. The taverns tend to subscribe. And even people who are illiterate or don't read that well, can have it read to them in taverns. So that's one of the ways this kind of document gets dispersed throughout the colonies.
And then finally I'd want to think carefully about the chronology, about the moment that this represents of March 1775. It's clearly a divisive moment and a moment when people are under some pressure, here in Providence and in other places, to take sides. To get out there and not to say, "I agree with this or that position, I agree with these rights." But vote with your feet, or in this case, vote with your tea. To show up publicly, and to denounce tea drinking and tea drinkers, and take a side and get off the fence. And that makes sense. It's March 1775, it's long after tea has been considered a terrible noxious weed that begins in the mid-1760s. It's after the Boston Tea Party, which is December of '73, so there's a precedent, these people know there's been destruction of tea, which has been very controversial. In some ways, they're maybe showing that they agree with the Tea Party. That they're having their own Tea Party, they're consuming it too, not by water but by fire. And it's after the retaliation to the Tea Party, which were the Acts to close down the port of Boston. The first Continental Congress has met and has encouraged people not to drink tea, so we know these people are supporting the Continental Congress, even though that that's never mentioned in here. And it's about let's see, a month and a little bit, before the outbreak of warfare, so its a very tense time in New England.