Browse Items (116 total)

Scrapbooks were a common way for people in both the North and the South to process and keep a record of the war. Thus, they provide insights into what people were reading, what they were feeling, and what kinds of information they found important. A…

This color lithograph published by E. B. & E. C. Kellogg of Hartford, Connecticut, and George Whiting of New York City dates from 1861 or 1862. It is believed to be the first time that the elephant and donkey appear together depicting the…

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 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…

The Boston News-Letter was the first newspaper in America to survive beyond its first issue. Indeed, it survived for seventy-two years as a fixture of the Boston publishing scene. The founding editor and publisher was John Campbell (1653-1728), who…

Getting news by telegraph and railroad was much more difficult for Southern newspapers than Northern papers. This was true in general, but even more so when General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into Northern territory.…

One of the few battlefield reporters to cover the Civil War from beginning to end—from Bull Run to the fall of Richmond—was C.C. Coffin (1823-96) of the Boston Journal. After the Battle of Gettysburg, when the outcome was assured by late…

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…

This illustration depicts an American Tract Society (ATS) colporteur at work. The term “colporteur” was coined in eighteenth-century France as a name for itinerant peddlers of books, especially religious books. In America, the term came…

Throughout the colonial period, almanacs were the best-selling product of the American press. The almanac was one of the first imprints of the Cambridge Press—the first press in British North America—in the 1640s; by the 1760s tens of…