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Value of the internet…
May 13, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
I never fail to be amazed at the incredible wealth of information which is available on the internet, and I never fail to be thankful for such an incredible resource, particularly remembering what it took thirty years ago to research a newspaper.
Back in the 1970’s and ’80’s, when I wrote up an issue for the catalog I had to pull out the encyclopedia if I was unsure of a specific date or consequences of a certain battle. And I also kept close at hand other resources which would document events I was finding in our inventory of newspapers.
But today, more information than I could possibly need flashes on my screen in a matter of seconds. What was the date James Buchanan died? Wikipedia tells me more quickly then it takes me to type “james buchanan”. Many times I’ll read an interesting article about a person which sounds intriguing but is lost to my memory. The web quickly provides a wealth of detail.
What brings this to mind is an entry I worked on this morning. The “Army & Navy Journal” of Dec. 3, 1864 has a touching item about a Mrs. Bixby who received a letter of condolence from Abraham Lincoln for her loss of five sons in the Civil War, the sixth was lying wounded in a hospital. The article includes the letter by Lincoln. Not having heard of this letter, as a whim I decided to Google “mrs. Bixby letter” to see if this was an “event”. To my surprise there is more to the story than the article could give, thanks to the “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”.
The touching letter by President Lincoln can be read in the photo. Below is the “rest of the story”:
Credit: “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”: In the fall of 1864, Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew wrote to President Lincoln asking him to express condolences to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow who was believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War. Lincoln’s letter to her was printed by the Boston Evening Transcript. Later it was revealed that only two of Mrs. Bixby’s five sons died in battle (Charles and Oliver). One deserted the army, one was honorably discharged, and another deserted or died a prisoner of war.
The authorship of the letter has been debated by scholars, some of whom believe it was written instead by John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries. The original letter was destroyed by Mrs. Bixby, who was a Confederate sympathizer and disliked President Lincoln. Copies of an early forgery have been circulating for many years, causing some people to believe they have the original letter.
The point of this piece is to cite just one example how the internet opens a whole new world to the tidbits of history we find within early newspapers. A 150 year old article might pique the curiosity, but it is the internet which can satisfy. It’s a fascinating combination of very old & very new technology which fit so well in this hobby we love. Give the internet a try with some articles in your collection. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you will find.
I need more than just the headline…
May 10, 2010 by TimHughes · 1 Comment
We get many emails and phone calls requesting values of newspapers found in attics, given by friends, or purchased at a yard sale, etc. We try to be as helpful as possible and ask for photos if they use email. This almost comical photo came in the other day–apparently with the thought that the headline was all we needed to see to determine a value. As you might imagine, we need to see more…..
Perhaps not a good combination…
May 8, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
This front page headline in the “Evening Wisconsin“, Milwaukee, July 13, 1888 makes one wonder who is going to make “the call”. Follow-up articles might have provided interesting reading.
How things have changed…
May 3, 2010 by TimHughes · 2 Comments
The John Scopes trial of 1925, called the “monkey trial” for his teaching of evolution in the classroom against Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, drew national attention, particularly with two notable attorneys on the case: William Jennings Bryan and Charles Darrow.
The “Bethlehem Globe” newspaper from Pennsylvania, July 10, 1925, reported the opening of the case with the front page heading: “Evolution Trial Opened By Prayer; Judge Has A Bible”. Fast forwarding some 85 years one would wonder if a trial with such religious over-tones would have been permitted to open in such a way. For better of for worse, it was a different era. It is a headline unlikely to be seen today.
An historical anecdote…
May 1, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
The following item from the “Massachusetts Centinel” of Boston, August 29, 1787, is evidence of some timely humor when the country was awaiting the results of the Constitutional Convention.
First newspapers in Maine…
April 26, 2010 by TimHughes · 1 Comment
It may be a surprise to some that Maine did not become a state until 1820, much later than most of the other New England states which were among the original thirteen colonies. It was a part of Massachusetts in the 18th century and figured in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, balanced by Maine as a free state.
Benjamin Titcomb, a native of Maine, was the first printer in the state and joining with Thomas Wait started the “Gazette and Weekly Advertiser” in Falmouth (now Portland) on January 1, 1785. But just a year later Titcomb left the newspaper and Wait changed the newspaper’s name to the “Cumberland Gazette“, Cumberland being the name of the county in which Falmouth was located. It changed names again six years later to the “Eastern Herald“.
Titcomb’s son, Benjamin Titcomb, Jr., started Maine’s second newspaper on Oct. 8, 1790, called the “Gazette of Maine” and six years later these first two newspapers would be combined to be the “Eastern Herald and Gazette of Maine“.
The other 18th century newspapers published in present-day Maine were the “Eastern Star” in Hallowell. 1794, the “Tocsin” also in Hallowell, 1795, the “Kennebec Intelligencer” in Augusta (then called Harrington) 1795, the “Wiscasset Telegraph” in 1796, “The Gazette” in in Portland, 1798, the “Wiscasset Argus” in 1797, the “Oriental Trumpet” of Portland, 1798, and the “Castine Journal” on Jan. 2, 1799. Many of these titles had a very short life.
First newspapers in Louisiana…
April 19, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
Being a French settlement from the early 1700’s, it would be of no surprise that the first newspaper in present-day Louisiana was French: “Moniteur de la Louisiane” which began in New Orleans on March 3, 1794. Three years later it became the official mouthpiece of the government, and continued to print until the publisher’s death in July, 1814.
Louisiana’s first newspaper done by a publisher of English or American extraction was the “Union: New Orleans Advertiser and Price Current” by James Lyon, of Vermont, which began on Dec. 13, 1803. Just one day later Louisiana’s third newspaper began–a French publication–“Le Telegraphe, et le Commercial Advertiser“. Both these latter two endeavors began just a few months after the Louisiana Purchase. Actually “Le Telegraphe” began as a French publication but later changed to both French and English, a tradition which held true for many Louisiana newspapers at least through the Civil War.
James Gordon Bennett and his New York Herald…
April 8, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
A book I am currently reading, “An Empire of Wealth” by John Steele Gordon, has a page or two concerning newspapers, mostly focused on the innovations of James Gordon Bennett (image to the left is from the Harper’s Weekly dated July 10, 1858) and his “New York Herald“, offering some insights new to me and likely new to you. It is a bit lengthy but has some interesting information I felt was worthy of sharing:
“The biggest difference between the newspapers of the pre-industrial world and those of today was politics. Most general-interest newspapers were the instruments of political factions, praising one party and excoriating all others. They were, in reality, little more than an editorial page wrapped in some highly tendentious news.
A Scots immigrant to New York, James Gordon Bennett, changed all that. Born in 1795 into one of Scotland’s few Catholic families, Bennett was always a man apart, which can be an asset for a journalist. He was also remarkably ugly, with severely crossed eyes. When a young journalist interviewed him in the 1850’s at his office across from New York’s City Hall, he reported that Bennett ‘looked at me with one eye, while he looked out at the City Hall with the other.’
Well educated in Aberdeen, he wrote his first piece of journalism about the Battle of Waterloo, when he was twenty, and four years later, sensing greater opportunity, immigrated to the United States. He worked at a series of newspapers from Boston to Charleston before settling in New York where, three times, he tried to found a newspaper that would expound Jacksonian principles. Each attempt was a failure.
Steam, however, was changing the newspaper business as it was changing everything else by the 1830’s. The new rotary presses, powered by steam, could turn out thousands of copies of a newspaper a night and at a much lower price than had been possible before. Bennett decided to try something new. On May 6, 1835, with $500 in capital, an office in a dank cellar, and himself as the only employee, Bennett began publishing the “New York Herald“.
Bennett made the Herald nonpartisan in its news articles, sought always to be the first with the news, and sold it to a mass audience by having it hawked on the streets at a penny a copy by the armies of newsboys that would quickly become a feature of the American urban scene for more than a hundred years. None of these ideas was original with Bennett. But it was he who put them all together for the first time. He also introduced a dazzling array of other journalistic innovations. He was the first to print a weather report and to cover sports regularly. He was the first to cover business news and stock prices in a general-interest newspaper. And while ‘respectable’ papers weren’t supposed to notice such things, when a beautiful prostitute was murdered in one of New York’s more fashionable brothels, Bennett played the story for all it was worth.
The “Herald’s” circulation soared, and other papers were forced to follow suit as the city, and then the country, became transfixed with the story. Within a few years the ‘Herald” was among the city’s most successful papers. Bennett traveled to Europe, where he signed up correspondents in London, Rome and Paris to supply the “Herald” with exclusive copy, the world’s first foreign correspondents. He fought Congress to establish the principle that out-of-town newspapers had as much right to the congressional press galleries as the local papers, the beginning of the Washington press corps. He even coined the use of the world ‘leak’, to refer to the stores slipped to reporters by politicians for their own purposes.
As the telegraph began to spread across the country, Bennett exploited it to the hilt. When the Mexican Was broke out, only two years after Morse’s successful demonstration, Bennett organized a consortium of newspapers to fund a pony express from New Orleans to Charleston, which was connected to New York by telegraph. The reports the New York papers published were often days ahead of the official reports arriving in Washington.
By the time of the Civil War the “Herald” was, by far, the largest and most influential newspaper in the country, and all other major papers had followed its model, profoundly transforming the newspaper business. Its daily circulation during the war reached as high as 400,000, many times the total circulation of all American newspaper combined fifty years earlier.”
The first newspaper in Kentucky…
April 5, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
The first newspaper ever published west of the Allegheny Mountains was established in Lexington, in 1787, by John Bradford. It was then called the “Kentucke Gazette“, but the final “e” of Kentucky was afterward changed to “y”, in consequence of the Virginia legislature requiring certain advertisements to be inserted in the “Kentucky Gazette“.
Go To: http://www.kentuckygazette.com/
This paper was born of the necessities of the times. The want of a government independent of Virginia was then universally felt, and the second convention that met in Danville, in 1785, to discuss that subject, resolved, “That to ensure unanimity in the opinion of the people respecting the propriety of separating the district of Kentucky from Virginia and forming a separate state government, and to give publicity to the proceedings of the convention, it is deemed essential to the interests of the country to have a printing press.”
John Bradford informed the committee that he would establish a paper if the convention would guarantee to him the public patronage. To this the convention acceded, and in 1786 Bradford sent to Philadelphia for the necessary materials. He had already received every encouragement from the citizens on Lexington, and at a meeting of the trustees in July, it was ordered “that the use of a public lot be granted to John Bradford free, on condition that he establish a printing press in Lexington; the lot to be free to him as long as the press is in town,”
At last, after many months on the route, the precious printing material arrived, and on August 18, 1787, appeared the first number of the first newspaper ever published in the then western wilderness. It was a quaint little brown thing, about the size of a half sheet of common letter paper, “subscription price 18 shillings per annum, advertisements of moderate length 3 shillings.” The first number is without a heading, and contains one advertisement, two short original articles, and the following apology from the editor:
“My customers will excuse this, my first publication, as I am much hurried to get an impression by the time appointed. A great part of the types fell into pi [disorder] in the carriage of them from Limestone (Maysville) to this office, and my partner, which is the only assistant I have, through an indisposition of the body, has been incapable of rendering the smallest assistance for ten days past. JOHN BRADFORD.”
Source: Much of the credit for this post goes to George W. Ranck’s “History of Lexington, Kentucky…”
To laminate or not…
April 3, 2010 by TimHughes · Leave a Comment
Fellow collector Morris Brill asks, “What are your thoughts of laminating newspapers?”
In a word–or three–don’t do it. Lamination is a one-way process, by which a newspaper is permanently sealed between two large pieces of plastic, heated such that the two plastic sheets bind to one another. Newspapers laminated as such cannot be retrieved without considerable damage.
Collectors typically like to touch and feel their newspapers, and if kept in a protective folder, a Mylar bag or sleeve, or even if encapsulated (similar to lamination but the only permanent binding is at the edges, beyond the margins of the newspaper) this can be done. But if laminated a newspaper cannot be returned to its unprotected state.
Now, if a newspaper is very fragile, has more of a personal, family, or sentimental attachment and there is no concern for potential collector value, then lamination might be an alternative for permanent protection.