For every major event or issue of the colonial period, newspapers printed the opinions of the day, in many cases attempting to influence public opinion. Issues such as medical discoveries, education, and censorship are covered in this collection along with important events such as the French and Indian War, the trial of John Peter Zenger, and the Boston Massacre. Each chapter introduces the event or issue and includes news articles, letters, essays, even poetry representing both sides of the argument as they affected Americans. Each document is preceded by an explanatory introduction. This is the only collection of primary source documents from colonial newspapers on the events of the era and will be a valuable tool for research and classroom discussion.

Excerpt from Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers: 1704-1750 Literature in the American colonies in the earlier half of the eighteenth century was produced chiefly by ecclesiastics and by extremely practical men of affairs. The New England divines were volumi nous writers. Any catalogue or bibliography of ante-revolutionary publications shows a large pro portion of sermons and theological treatises. Wherever such works have possessed literary or historical value, they have been fully analyzed by the literary historian. On the other hand, men of affairs like Benjamin Franklin and Colonel Wil liam Byrd, whose writings represent the overflow from varied activities, have also been studied. And these two classes of men produced all the well known literature of the period. Men of letters did not exist. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

From the Foreword: The colonial newspaper, as a social institution, played a significant role in the foundation of our American democracy. The weekly journals, with their pioneering, courageous publishers, stimulated the political, economic and cultural growth of the American people. But more important-the newspapers promoted colonial solidarity. In the hands of the Patriots, the gazettes fought for colonial economic and political independence from England. The colonists, likewise, battled for the freedom of the newspaper, because they knew only too well that its liberty of publication was closely connected with the achievements of their own political and economic rights in the conflict with the crown. It was then that the slogan "freedom of the press" was born to become a part of our deeply rooted American tradition. Since those early days, the newspaper has been an influential factor in the growth of America democracy. The history of the colonial era, to illustrate, cannot be fully understood without grasping the significance and development of the colonial newspaper from one poverty-stricken sheet in 1704 to forty-eight newspapers scattered along the seaboard in 1775, when the Revolutionary War broke out.

In 1897, William Randolph Hearst said that his newspaper did not simply cover events that had already happened. «It doesn't wait for things to turn up», Hearst said. «It turns them up.» This book traces the close relationship between media and the United States' development from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. It explores how the active voice of citizen-journalists and trained media professionals has turned to media to direct the moral compass of the people and to set the agenda for a nation, and discusses how changes in technology have altered the way in which participatory journalism is practiced. What makes the book powerful is that its assessment of the influence and use of media encompasses many levels: it explores the potential of media as an agent for change from within small communities to the national stage.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Colonial American Newspapers fills an important gap in the study of the content of colonial prints and concludes that as newspapers evolved to meet the informational needs of society, they helped unify the colonies by focusing upon events of local and intercolonial importance.