"In the management of her household, she displayed every good quality necessary to form a prudent and beloved Mistress of a family—regularity and order, neatness and exactness," said the Pennsylvania Gazette about Ann Ross, who died in 1773. Historical obituaries record what society deems to be of value in a...
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Journalism History
"Out of the Jaws of Death! Out of the Mouth of Hell!" - Dispatches from the Front during the American Civil War
"We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the war—perhaps history." 1 So wrote General George McClellan to Chief of Staff Henry Halleck and President Abraham Lincoln before the telegraph wires went dead the morning of September 17, 1862. The wires would remain dead all day, as...
Slinging Mud and Talking Trash: The Gutter Age of American Journalism
The Golden Age of America's founding was also the gutter age of American journalism. It seems a remarkable paradox. And the Founding Fathers were both the perpetrators and the victims of this brand of journalism. The Declaration of Independence was literature, but the New England Courant talked trash. The Constitution...
Puritan Amnesia and Secular Attitude: Newspapers and National Identity in Revolutionary America
For many, the American Revolution represents the beginning of our history as a society. In the public memory of the past, the preceding colonial years are relegated to Puritan pre-history, as if only after 1776 we began to walk upright. This assertion of public sentiment can be traced through diverse...
Pursuing Democracy: The First Hispanic Newspapers in the United States
In 1807, French intervention in Spain and Napoleon's puppet government in the Iberian Peninsula propelled many Hispanic intellectuals to the young American Republic. There, they translated into Spanish the U.S. Constitution and the ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. These translations were published by early...
