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.

Presents a collection of primary source newspaper articles and correspondence reporting the events of the Revolution, containing both American and British eyewitness accounts and commentary and analysis from thirty-seven historians.

From the Preface: The following study aims to give a fairly comprehensive survey of the literary contributions in colonial newspapers from 1704 to 1750. Aside from the well-known essays of Benjamin Franklin in The New England Courant and in The Pennsylvania Gazette, the literary material in the colonial weeklies has been hitherto neglected. Especially is this true of the Southern papers. Quotations of some length from the essays and verse published in colonial journals have therefore been considered advisable in the present work. In most instances the originals of these extracts are accessible only in the collections of Historical Societies, or in the files of some especially favored library. The student who wishes to examine The South Carolina Gazette, for example, must go to the Charleston Library Society for the only file known to be extant. All quotations in the present volume follow literally the punctuation, spelling, and capitalization of the originals, no matter how inconsistent these may seem to the modern reader. The only exceptions to this rule are a few corrections of obvious printers' errors, the retention of which would add needless confusion.

The Public Prints is the first comprehensive study of the role of the earliest American newspapers in the society and culture of the eighteenth century. In the hands of Charles E. Clark, American newspaper publishing becomes a branch of the English world of print in a story that begins in the bustling streets of late seventeenth-century London and moves to the provincial towns of England and across the Atlantic. While Clark's most detailed attention in America is to the three multi-newspaper towns of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, evidence from Williamsburg, Charleston, and Barbados also contributes to generalizations about the craft and business of eighteenth-century publishing. Stressing continuing trans-Atlantic connections as well as English origins, Clark argues that the newspapers were a force both for "anglicization" in their attempts to replicate English culture in America and for "Americanization" in creating a fuller awareness of the British-American experience across colonial boundaries. He suggests, finally, that the newspapers' greatest cultural role in provincial America was the creation of a community bound by the celebration of common values and attachments through the shared ritual of reading.

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.