Professor Background Essay • Lecture 1
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Central historical question What happens when ordinary Americans gain direct access to print? |
Research status: generated from the lecture script, outline, and slide deck and expanded with scholarship on the penny press, the reading public, the lyceum, the partisan press, religious publishing, and the limits of literacy
Grounded in the Chapter 10 Lecture 1 materials and expanded with primary evidence and modern scholarship on the postal network, the steam press, Benjamin Day’s Sun, the Great Moon Hoax, the Helen Jewett murder, sentimental fiction, lithography, the lyceum, Jacksonian party newspapers, the American Tract Society, and the anti-literacy laws of the slave South.
The lecture materials follow a clear arc. In 1815 the United States was a rural republic with a highly literate white population and a fast-growing postal system. Over the next generation, steam presses, machine-made paper, and advertising turned printing from a craft into an industry. The result was the first American mass media: penny newspapers that sold crime, scandal, and hoaxes to working people; cheap novels and story papers; mass-produced pictures; traveling lecturers; and party newspapers that turned elections into public shows. Reformers answered with their own flood of print. The deck’s newest slide asks the question that keeps the story honest: democratization for whom?
Historians approach this story from several directions. Michael Schudson shows how the penny press invented “news” as a product sold to a mass audience. Richard R. John shows that the federal post office made a national conversation possible. Patricia Cline Cohen uses the Jewett case to show how crime became entertainment. Angela Ray examines the lyceum as a new kind of public. David Paul Nord argues that religious publishers were pioneers of mass media, not its opponents. Jane Tompkins defends the sentimental novel against critics who saw it as a sign of cultural decline.
The resulting interpretation should avoid two easy stories. One is a simple tale of progress in which cheap print set everyone free. The other is a story of decline in which serious reading was cheapened by sensation. The evidence is more mixed. Cheap print widened the circle of people who could read, argue, and be heard. It also created new gatekeepers—editors, publishers, party managers, and moral reformers—and it left large groups of Americans outside the circle entirely.
Picture a farm family in upstate New York in 1815. The War of 1812 has just ended, and a wave of national pride is sweeping the country. The family probably owns a Bible, an almanac, perhaps a schoolbook. A weekly newspaper arrives by post, shared among neighbors and read aloud in the evening. Most of what it prints is political news and items copied from other papers. City newspapers are expensive, sold mainly by annual subscription to merchants and lawyers.
Yet the foundations of something new were in place. Many white Americans could read. When the 1840 census became the first to ask about literacy, it counted only about 9 percent of white adults over twenty as unable to read and write—one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Common schools, Sunday schools, and the Protestant emphasis on reading scripture all helped. So did the post office. Congress had set low postage rates for newspapers in 1792 and let editors exchange papers for free, so news printed in one town quickly spread to others. By the late 1820s, historian Richard R. John notes, the United States had far more post offices per person than Britain or France. Canals, steamboats, and later railroads carried the mail faster every year.
Between the 1820s and the 1840s, printing itself was transformed. A printer working a hand press pulled one sheet at a time—a couple hundred impressions an hour. Steam-powered cylinder presses multiplied that output, and in 1847 Richard Hoe patented a rotary “lightning” press that could print thousands of sheets an hour. Paper-making machines that produced long continuous rolls cut the cost of paper. Stereotyping (casting a solid metal plate from set type) made popular works cheap to reprint.
The economic change mattered as much as the machines. The old newspaper lived on subscriptions and on printing contracts from political allies. The new one would live on advertising. If a paper could sell its pages to advertisers, it could sell its copies cheaply—and the more copies it sold, the more advertisers would pay. Editors now had a reason to write for the largest possible audience. Print was becoming a commodity.
On September 3, 1833, a twenty-three-year-old printer named Benjamin Day put out the first issue of a small four-page paper called the Sun. It cost one cent, when most New York dailies cost six cents and were sold by yearly subscription. Day hired boys to buy bundles of papers and sell them on street corners, shouting the headlines. His motto was “It Shines for All.”
“The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, all the news of the day . . .” — Benjamin H. Day, the Sun (New York), first issue, September 3, 1833
“All the news of the day” meant something new: police-court reports, fires, suicides, accidents, and human-interest stories about ordinary people. Apprentices, laborers, servants, and immigrants could afford it, and they bought it by the thousands. James Gordon Bennett launched the even livelier New York Herald in May 1835. Horace Greeley founded the New-York Tribune in 1841, a cheap paper with a more serious, reform-minded voice. Penny papers soon appeared in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
In late August 1835 the Sun ran six articles that claimed to be reprinted from a Scottish science journal. They reported that the British astronomer Sir John Herschel, working at the Cape of Good Hope with an enormous new telescope, had seen forests, seas, bison-like animals, walking beavers—and winged, human-like creatures on the moon.
“We scientifically denominated them the Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat.” — “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” the Sun (New York), August 28, 1835
None of it was true. Herschel really was in South Africa, but the journal article was invented, almost certainly by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter who later admitted it. Many readers believed the story at first, and other papers reprinted it. On August 28 the Sun boasted a circulation of 19,360, which it claimed beat the Times of London. Rival editors soon denounced the fake, but readers seemed to enjoy arguing over whether they had been fooled almost as much as the story itself.
Less than a year later, the penny press found a darker story. Early on April 10, 1836, Rosina Townsend, who ran a brothel at 41 Thomas Street in lower Manhattan, discovered that Helen Jewett, a young woman in her house, had been killed with blows to the head and her bed set on fire. Police arrested Richard P. Robinson, a nineteen-year-old clerk and regular visitor. Bennett went to the scene himself and wrote a vivid, almost voyeuristic description of the body for the Herald. For weeks the papers fought over the case: the Herald suggested Robinson might be innocent; the Sun insisted he was guilty. In June a jury acquitted him, and many readers suspected that money and connections had bought his freedom. A private tragedy had become a public drama, and the papers that told it best sold the most copies.
Books got cheaper too. In New York, James and John Harper started a printing firm in 1817 that became Harper & Brothers in 1833 and one of the largest publishers in the country; in Philadelphia, Carey & Lea published many of the most popular American novels of the 1820s. Because the United States did not honor foreign copyrights, publishers could reprint British authors such as Walter Scott and Charles Dickens without paying them. Around 1839–1840, “mammoth” weekly story papers such as Brother Jonathan and the New World printed entire novels on huge sheets that sold for pennies.
American writers found audiences of their own. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales—beginning with The Pioneers (1823) and including The Last of the Mohicans (1826)—followed the frontiersman Natty Bumppo through the forests of New York. Cooper turned the frontier into a national mythology about wilderness, conquest, and the supposed disappearance of Native peoples.
The best-selling novels of the era were often written by women and read mainly by women. Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) and Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) were early examples. By mid-century, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) told of young girls who suffered loss and learned faith, self-control, and goodness, while E.D.E.N. Southworth published dozens of novels, many first serialized in story papers. These books taught what the slide deck calls emotional literacy: readers were expected to cry, to feel for the characters, and to come away morally improved. Not everyone approved. In 1855 Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose own books sold far fewer copies, complained to his publisher:
“America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash . . .” — Nathaniel Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, January 1855
Hawthorne’s sneer reveals the stakes. When ordinary readers, many of them women, decided what sold, the old idea that an educated elite should define good literature came under pressure.
Pictures became cheap as well. Lithography—printing from an image drawn in grease on a flat stone—arrived in the United States around 1820 and spread quickly, because it did not require cutting into metal or wood. In 1834 a young New York printer named Nathaniel Currier went into the business. In January 1840 the steamboat Lexington burned on Long Island Sound, killing more than one hundred people; within days Currier issued a dramatic print of the disaster in an “extra” edition of the Sun, and it sold enormously. James Merritt Ives became his partner in 1857, and Currier & Ives went on to sell millions of inexpensive prints of disasters, horse races, farm scenes, and politicians. Ordinary families could now hang pictures on their walls.
In November 1826, in the small town of Millbury, Massachusetts, a lecturer named Josiah Holbrook organized his neighbors into a society for mutual education. He called it a lyceum, after Aristotle’s school in ancient Athens. Members met in the evening to hear talks on science, history, and practical subjects, and to discuss them afterward. The idea spread fast; Holbrook later claimed about 3,000 town lyceums by the mid-1830s, mostly in New England, New York, and the Midwest.
At first, local people lectured each other. Soon towns invited traveling speakers and charged admission, and some lecturers became celebrities. Ralph Waldo Emerson earned much of his living on the lecture circuit, and many of his famous essays began as talks given to paying audiences in town halls and churches. Audiences judged lecturers much as they judged actors. They came to be improved, but also to be entertained.
The subjects showed that mix. Alongside astronomy and moral philosophy, crowds flocked to lectures on phrenology—the claim, developed by the European doctors Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim, that character could be read from the shape of the skull. Spurzheim lectured in Boston in 1832 and died there that November. The brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler later built a phrenology business in New York, reading heads for a fee. In 1836 the French lecturer Charles Poyen toured New England demonstrating mesmerism, putting volunteers into trances on stage. Today we call these pseudosciences. To audiences in the 1830s, they looked like exciting new knowledge that anyone could judge.
Cheap print also transformed politics. As states dropped property requirements, nearly all white men could vote by the 1830s, and parties needed ways to reach them. Newspapers were the answer. Andrew Jackson’s supporters built a national network of friendly papers, with the Washington Globe, founded in 1830 and edited by Francis Preston Blair, at its center. Amos Kendall, a former Kentucky editor in Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” helped shape that operation. The opposition Whigs built networks of their own.
Party papers did not pretend to be neutral. They printed speeches and platforms, but also insults, rumors, cartoons, and campaign songs. The election of 1840 showed how far this could go. When a Democratic paper mocked the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, as a man who would be content with a log cabin and a barrel of hard cider, the Whigs turned the insult into a brand. They staged rallies with log cabins, cider barrels, banners, and parades, and sang “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Horace Greeley edited a Whig campaign paper called The Log Cabin. About 80 percent of eligible voters turned out, a record at the time, and Harrison, the son of a wealthy Virginia planter family, won as a man of the people.
To many ministers and reformers, penny papers full of murders looked like a moral danger. Their answer was not to stop printing but to print more—and better. The American Tract Society, founded in New York in 1825, bought steam-powered presses soon after it began and produced millions of short pamphlets on salvation, temperance, the Sabbath, and proper behavior. From 1841 it sent traveling agents called colporteurs into rural areas to sell or give away its books and pray with families. Historian David Paul Nord argues that such religious publishers were among the first true mass-media organizations in the country.
Women writers also used print to teach. Lydia Maria Child wrote The Frugal Housewife (1829), a best-selling guide to thrifty household management, and edited a children’s magazine, the Juvenile Miscellany. Catharine Maria Sedgwick wrote novels such as Home (1835) that modeled good family life. Both believed that reading could shape character, so reading the right things was a civic duty. Print could also carry reform into dangerous territory. In 1833 Child published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, an attack on slavery and racial prejudice. Sales of her other books fell, the Boston Athenaeum withdrew her library privileges, and so many parents cancelled subscriptions that she gave up the Juvenile Miscellany in 1834.
The new print culture did not include everyone, and the sharpest limit was slavery. In 1829 David Walker, a free Black man in Boston, published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, calling on enslaved people to resist, and copies were smuggled into Southern ports. Southern legislatures responded with laws against teaching enslaved people to read and write: Georgia in 1829, North Carolina in 1830, Virginia in 1831, Alabama in 1832, and South Carolina in 1834. After Nat Turner—a man who could read—led his rebellion in August 1831, these restrictions tightened further. Teaching an enslaved person to read could bring fines, jail, or whipping. Frederick Douglass, who learned to read in secret in Baltimore, understood exactly why.
“From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.” — Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), on overhearing why his enslaver forbade his reading lessons
Free Black Americans built their own print culture anyway; Freedom’s Journal, the first African American–owned newspaper, appeared in New York in 1827. In 1835 the American Anti-Slavery Society mailed large numbers of antislavery pamphlets into the South. In Charleston, a mob broke into the post office in late July and burned the mail in public, and Postmaster General Amos Kendall declined to order local postmasters to deliver such material. The postal system that built a national reading public could be shut when the message threatened slavery. Even in the North, inclusion had limits: in 1845 the New Bedford Lyceum barred Black people from membership, and Emerson and Charles Sumner refused to lecture there.
Other barriers were quieter but real. A penny was cheap, but for the poorest families any regular expense mattered, and books remained costly. Print was strongest in cities and along canals and rail lines; isolated rural families saw far less of it. Immigrants arrived with different languages and levels of schooling; German speakers built their own presses, while many poor Irish immigrants of the 1840s had had little chance to learn to read. The Cherokee Nation published its own bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, from 1828. And women, central as readers and writers, could not vote in the elections the partisan press covered.
Between 1815 and 1850 the United States became a nation of readers. A literate white population, a federal postal network, steam presses, cheaper paper, and advertising combined to make print abundant. Benjamin Day’s Sun proved that news could be sold to working people for a penny, and the Moon Hoax and the Jewett murder showed how quickly the new press could turn science and crime into shared public drama. Cheap novels, story papers, and lithographs carried the same change into fiction and images. Lyceums made learning a performance. Party newspapers made elections a spectacle that drew record numbers of voters. Reformers answered with millions of tracts and improving books of their own.
So what happened when ordinary Americans gained direct access to print? They became a public: people who read the same stories at the same time, argued about them, and expected their tastes and opinions to matter. But the new culture also created new gatekeepers—editors chasing sales, party managers chasing votes, and moralists trying to police what the people should read and feel. And it was bounded by exclusion, most brutally in the South, where reading itself was made a crime for enslaved people. Next time, we will see how the emotional energy of the penny press and the sentimental novel overflowed into the revival tent of the Second Great Awakening.
The open question is whether the market for print expanded democracy or turned citizens into consumers. The penny press gave working people an audience but taught them to want sensation; the partisan press brought men to the polls, often with slogans rather than arguments. The evidence supports both readings. What it rules out is the idea that culture in this era was simply handed down from the top—or simply created from the bottom.
Course materials / lecture script, outline, and slide deck. Supply the core narrative: the 1815 setting, the print revolution, the penny press, the Moon Hoax and Jewett case, sentimental fiction, lithography, the lyceum, the partisan press, reform print, and “Who Was Excluded?” The essay expands that framing and corrects a few details flagged in the instructor notes.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News. Classic account of how the penny press created modern “news” as a commercial product.
Richard R. John, Spreading the News. The post office as the infrastructure of the national reading public; essential for the 1815 setting and the 1835 mail controversy.
Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett; Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon. The best guides to the Jewett case and the Moon Hoax.
Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture. How the lecture circuit created a new kind of public.
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading. Evangelical publishers as pioneers of mass media; central to the reform section.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture. The core debate over sentimental fiction—Tompkins taking it seriously as cultural work, Douglas criticizing it.
Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught. African American literacy under slavery and the anti-literacy laws.
Historical accuracy: The essay keeps the lecture’s chronology while correcting or qualifying several points: wood-pulp paper came after this period; the fastest presses arrived in the late 1840s; Blair, not Kendall, edited the Globe; the Sun’s Moon Hoax circulation figures are its own; Holbrook’s lyceum count is an estimate; and Warner and Cummins published at or after the end of the period.
Historiographical balance: The interpretation follows the lecture’s democratization framing while presenting the debate over sentimental fiction (Tompkins versus Douglas), the role of religious publishers (Nord), and the commercial character of the penny press (Schudson). It avoids both a pure progress story and a story of decline, and gives the deck’s “Who Was Excluded?” question full weight.
Narrative potential: Strong teachable scenes include newsboys hawking the first Sun, readers arguing over lunar man-bats, Bennett at 41 Thomas Street, Currier’s burning Lexington, Spurzheim’s crowded Boston lectures, log cabins and cider barrels in 1840, the Charleston mail burning, and young Frederick Douglass learning to read in secret.
Historical-thinking spine: Context explains the literate, connected republic of 1815; Cause links technology and advertising to cheap print; Consequence appears in the penny press, the lyceum, partisan spectacle, and reform publishing; Evidence can be modeled through Day’s prospectus, the Moon Hoax text, Hawthorne’s letter, campaign material, and Douglass’s Narrative. The open question keeps the analysis from collapsing into a single verdict.