Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

Though political scientists and historians of the 19th-century United States have always turned to newspapers as an important source, there has in recent years been a growing interest in newspapers as a distinct object of study among historians, communications scholars, and literary critics. Newspapers were not only publishers and promoters of important literature but also central to the culture of literary production and consumption. All the scholarship, by various disciplines, produced on newspapers is relevant to the ongoing project to historicize, interpret, contextualize, and theorize 19th-century American literature in all its varied relations to its readership and to the nation generally. Though circulation grew rapidly over the century, the reach of newspapers was not limited to official subscription lists or, later, to street sales. As both scholars and contemporary observers have noted, various mechanisms—formal exchanges between newspapers hundreds of miles apart, reading rooms, coffee houses, and the general cultural practice of reusing and sharing newspapers—meant that the readership for newspapers extended beyond their paying subscribers throughout the century, but especially in the antebellum years. Although in some senses newspapers may in the nineteenth century have ceded to magazines their 18th-century function of presenting a miscellany of material, for all practical purposes throughout the nineteenth century many newspapers, most often only four pages long, continued to play that role—they included poems, reviews, serialized novels, orations and lectures, cultural laments, letters from abroad, and reports on scientific discoveries along with the more expected news, random reflections or anecdotes, and editorial opinion. Through most of the century, however, the majority of newspapers devoted at least a quarter of their space to advertising. In the first third of the nineteenth century, party organs and commercial papers for the mercantile class grew to the point where they came to be seen as representing the two primary functions of the American newspaper. From the 1830s to the Civil War, various developments, including the penny press, the reform press, the religious press, and the African American press, changed the character of newspapers, even though their party functions remained uppermost. After the war, urban newspapers gradually grew in length and in the range of their coverage. Commercialization and the first steps toward professionalization began to change the mission of journalism, so that by the 1890s many urban papers more closely resembled newspapers of the next fifty years than they did newspapers of the previous generation.