Notes
[ 465 ] Notes - Introduction 1. This account of Franklin’s foray into printing draws primarily on his Autobiography, 1317–23, and on H. W. Brands’s excellent biography, The First American, 19–34. 2. All quotations from Franklin are drawn from the 1987 Library of America edition of his Writings and follow that collection’s style for spelling and punctuation. 3. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “journalism” entered the English language in 1833, when a writer for the Westminster Review translated the title of a new book—Du Journalisme —from French. The reviewer commented that the term “journalism” filled a significant gap because such “a word was sorely wanted.” 1. Foundations of the American Press, 1704–1763 1. Stephens, History of News, 148–49. 2. Nord, Communities of Journalism, chap. 1. 3. Stephens, History of News, 83. 4. Clark, “Newspapers of Provincial America,” 367. 5. This familiar tale can be found, for example, in Emery, Emery, and Roberts, The Press and America. 6. Stephens, History of News, 167–69. 7. Mitchell Stephens, for example, in History of News, offers a sensible definition of a newspaper: it must be published frequently and regularly; it must address many topics per issue; and it must have a regular title and format. By these lights, Harris, with only a single edition, produced a curiosity or a piece of ephemera, not a true newspaper. 8. See Emery, Emery, and Roberts, The Press and America; Stephens, History of News; Clark, “Newspapers of Provincial America.” 9. In presenting the news from the London papers, Campbell usually favored the official Gazette or else the Flying Post. He faced an obvious practical problem, which was that the newspapers he received were always at least six weeks old, given the minimum time required to cross the North Atlantic by ship (and in winter, no ships dared the crossing at all). Campbell took pains to try to reprint stories that pursued the same topic week after week. He wrote that he was trying to present his readers with a “Thread of Occurrences”—even if the news was late. 10. Clark, “Newspapers of Provincial America,” 378. 11. David D. Hall, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth-Century New England ,” in Folkerts, Media Voices, 5–16. Also see Clark, “Newspapers of Provincial America.” 12. E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” in Folkerts, Media Voices, 17–35. 13. A good description can be found in Burns, Infamous Scribblers, 69–72. 14. Nord, Communities of Journalism, chap. 1. 15. Franklin is the subject of several excellent recent biographies, including Brands, The First American ; and Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin. 16. At the time of his birth, his birthday was reckoned as January 6, 1705; under the revised calendar [ 466 ] NOTEs TO PAgEs 19–28 adopted during Franklin’s life, his date of birth became January 17, 1706. See Brands, The First American, chap. 1, for Franklin’s birth and childhood. Also worth consulting is Franklin’s Autobiography , although it is not particularly reliable in matters of fact. 17. Brands, The First American, 16. 18. Franklin, Autobiography, 1313. 19. Ibid., 1317. Interestingly, in Pilgrim’s Progress he would have encountered the allegorical character known as the Muckraker. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 1317–18. 22. Brands, The First American, 26. 23. Franklin, Writings, 6. 24. In June 1722, James printed a letter criticizing the authorities in Massachusetts for not doing enough to battle the pirates operating offshore. Referring to the captain of the ship who had been deputized by the authorities to give chase, James wrote: “’Tis thought he will sail sometime this month, if wind and weather permit,” insinuating that the captain lacked enthusiasm for the chase. With those words, James Franklin was engaging in exactly the kind of “watchdog” journalism , involving an assessment of the performance of the government or other powerful institutions , that Americans would enshrine in the Bill of Rights and esteem as a bulwark of liberty. But in the 1720s journalists enjoyed no such protections. The Massachusetts legislature ordered James jailed, and his apprentice, Ben, suddenly found himself serving as the acting publisher and managing editor of the New-England Courant at the tender age of sixteen. About a month later James won his freedom, but the incident must have made quite an impression on the young Ben. See Brands, The First American, 30. 25. Franklin, Writings, 44–47. In counseling caution, Franklin may have been acknowledging that the Courant had, in its brief...
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