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.

Gathering the attention and excitement of American colonists from Boston to Charleston, the religious revival of the 1740s traditionally known as the First Great Awakening provided colonial newspaper printers with their first story of transcolonial importance. At the time of the Awakening, American newspapers had become a vital part of the colonial information network as each major city offered at least one weekly paper. Papers printed weekly reports on revivalist preaching, eye-witness accounts of revival meetings, shocking stories of improper ordinations and church separations, as well as numerous contributed letters praising or denouncing virtually every aspect of the Awakening. No other colonial event of the 1740s, including the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Jacobite Rebellion (1745), came close to receiving as much newspaper coverage, making the First Great Awakening America’s first “Big Story.” In The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story, Lisa Smith offers the first scholarly work to examine in detail the printed newspaper record of the revival. This comprehensive, in-depth examination of colonial newspapers over a ten-year period uncovers information on shifts in the presentation of the revival over time, specific differences in regional reporting, and significant transformations in the newspaper personae of popular revivalists such as George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Using original newspaper excerpts and graphs revealing reporting trends, this book presents an engaging, detailed picture of how colonial newspaper printers covered the experience of the First Great Awakening.

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.

First there was the spoken word, the long-distance runner, and later the wall posters of ancient Rome and China. Here is an investigation of the human need to gather and spread news, proving that the hunger for news and sensationalism wasn't born with modern technology.

Introduction -- Reporting the awakening -- Regional paper wars -- Whitefield, Tennent, and Davenport : newsmakers of the awakening -- Conclusion -- Appendix 1 : methodology -- Appendix 2 : table of individual newspaper reporting on the revival.