June 15

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Providence Gazette (June 15, 1776).

“Palmer and Allen … are determined to dispose of many articles at prime cost.”

In the summer of 1776, Palmer and Allen sold a “Quantity of dry goods” and various spices at “the Shop lately occupied by Mr. Charles Dabney, near the East End of the Great Bridge, … in Providence.”  They ran an advertisement in the June 15 edition of the Providence Gazette, announcing that they “Just opened” and made the selection available to consumers. To entice prospective customers, Palmer and Allen provided a lengthy list of dozens of items, including “superfine and middling priced broadcloths, … a quantity of blankets, … Barcelona and other silk handkerchiefs, … buckskin breeches, … silk and worsted knee straps, … mens and womens stockings, … blond and thread laces, … jack and pen knives, … womens white metal thimbles, … brass ink pots, … steel tobacco boxes, [and] a quantity of very beautiful enamelled and cream coloured ware.”  Spices and other groceries on hand included pepper, allspice, tamarind, coffee, and “choice cocoa.”  With such a lengthy list, Palmer and Allen provided a catalog of their merchandise.

In a nota bene at the end of the advertisement, the partners indicated that they wished to liquidate their inventory as quickly as possible.  “Said Palmer and Allen being desirous to sell their goods speedily,” they informed readers, “are determined to dispose of many articles at prime cost, and the remainder for a very small profit.”  By “prime cost,” they meant the direct cost to them as shopkeepers.  In other words, Palmer and Allen claimed that they did not intend to charge any sort of retail markup for many of their wares, though they did not specify which of them customers could acquire at such a bargain.  For the rest, they generated only a “small profit” with a small retail markup.  Customers could not go wrong when they shopped at Palmer and Allen’s new store!  The savvy entrepreneurs hoped that their pricing would attract consumers, especially those who imagined getting extraordinary deals.  For some prospective customers, bargain prices may have transformed “wants” into “needs” as they envisioned themselves getting the better end of the deal when they made purchases from Palmer and Allen.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 15, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Providence Gazette (June 15, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (June 15, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (June 15, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (June 15, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (June 15, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (June 15, 1776).

June 14

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Essex Journal (June 14, 1776).

“Said Morse is succeeded in his School in this Town, by Mr. Robert Long.”

In the summer of 1776, Abel Morse, a schoolmaster, took to the pages of the Essex Journal to “RESPECTFULLY” inform the residents of Newburyport, Massachusetts, that “he shall discontinue his School … in consequence of being engaged in one of the Town Schools” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  He expressed his appreciation to “all his good friends for their former custom, and in particular for the satisfaction they now express in his former services.”

On the heels of the endorsement he claimed to have earned from his students and their families, Morse inserted a nota bene that announced that Robert Long “succeeded [him] in his School in this Town.”  Morse recommended Long “to all his good customers as a person in whom they will undoubtedly meet with satisfaction.”  Rather than leaving his former pupils to find a new instructor, Morse directed them to his replacement, noting that Long “will teach those branches which have been formerly taught in said School.”  Furthermore, Long would charge “the former prices” so Morse’s students would not incur higher expenses if they continued with the new teacher.

He also mentioned that “young Misses” could continue to benefit from “Mrs. Curtis’s instructions.”  In an advertisement that first ran in the Essex Journal on March 15, 1776, Morse reported that the “Working-School is continued by Mrs. Curtis and daughter as usual, by whom gentlemen and ladies may have sewing work done upon the shortest notice.”  Morse and Long apparently taught subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic while Curtis and her daughter taught sewing and other traditionally feminine skills.  Students could opt for lessons from Long, Curtis, or both.

Morse’s nota bene served as an introduction to Long’s own address to readers of the Essex Journal.  With his name as a headline, Long stated that he “DESIRES to inform Mr. Morse’s customers, and others, that he shall open the above mentioned School” on Monday, June 17.  The advertisement gave advance notice of only a few days.  He would endeavor to meet the standards established by Morse and “hopes he shall give satisfaction to all those gentlemen and ladies who will please to favor him with the instruction of their children.”  Despite the departure of Morse, the advertisement emphasized continuity for students who could learn the same subjects from Long as well as continue learning household skills from Curtis.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 14, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Gazette (June 14, 1776).

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Connecticut Gazette (June 14, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (June 14, 1776).

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Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (June 14, 1776).

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Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (June 14, 1776).

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Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (June 14, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published June 14, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Essex Journal (June 14, 1776).

June 13

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

New-England Chronicle (June 13, 1776).

“Rendering due praise and honour to the manly and virtuous supporters of the GLORIOUS CAUSE OF AMERICA.”

It was the first issue of the New-England Chronicle published by Edward E. Powars and Nathaniel Willis after Samuel Hall transferred the newspaper to them.  Their names appeared in the colophon integrated into the masthead at the top of the first page: “BOSTON: Printed by POWARS and WILLIS at their Office opposite the new COURT-HOUSE, Queen-Street.”  For the first order of business in the June 13, 1776, edition, the former printer and the new printers reminded readers about the transition in notices that ran in the first column on the first page.  They previously made the announcement in separate advertisements in the last issue.  Hall’s notice ran again without revisions or additions (except for a salutation, “To the PUBLIC,” and the original date, “Boston, June 6, 1776”) while Powars and Willis took the opportunity to add to their previous advertisement.

In so doing, they vowed to continue the editorial stance practiced by Hall.  The public, Powars and Willis promised, “may be assured, that the character [the New-England Chronicle] has hitherto sustained, in exposing, condemning, and execrating the jesuitical and infernal machinations of tories and tyrants, and in rendering due praise and honour to the manly and virtuous supporters of the GLORIOUS CAUSE OF AMERICA, we shall, with assiduity and zeal, endeavour to preserve.”  The New-England Chronicle catered to Patriots in Boston less than two months after the siege of that city ended when British troops departed on March 17.  Powars and Willis took their responsibilities seriously, stating that they would “select such pieces … as will best tend to encourage virtue and good order in society, and particularly such as may inspire all orders of men with a true spirit of resolution and heroism in support of our invaluable rights and liberties.”  With such promises made, they hoped “to be favoured with the custom of all the late and present subscribers of this paper.”  In other words, they encouraged readers who previously subscribed to renew their subscriptions and current subscribers to continue receiving the New-England Chronicle.  Their previous notice solicited subscribers and advertisers.  That portion appeared again, but this time the printers also requested “ingenious and well-written Essays, tending to promote the posterity and happiness of our injured and oppressed country.”  Through an eighteenth-century version of crowdsourcing, the public could play a role in maintaining the editorial voice that readers expected from the New-England Chronicle.  The publication had new printers, but those new proprietors pledged that the newspaper would remain the same.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 13, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Maryland Gazette (June 13, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (June 13, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (June 13, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (June 13, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (June 13, 1776).

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New-York Journal (June 13, 1776).

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New-York Journal (June 13, 1776).

June 12

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Journal (June 12, 1776).

“THE engagement between the Row-Gallies of this city, and the Roebuck and Liverpool English men of war.”

John Norman, an engraver from London, sold prints at his shop on Second Street in Philadelphia.  He also gained acclaim as the publisher of American editions of architectural manuals for which he engraved the images, but it was the prints available at his shop that he advertised in the June 12, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Journal.

One print showed the “engagement between the Row-Gallies of this city, and the Roebuck and Liverpool English men of war.”  It depicted a recent battle familiar to residents of Philadelphia and its hinterland.  In March, the Roebuck and the Liverpool blockaded the mouth of the Delaware Bay, eliminating access to the Delaware River and Philadelphia.  The American Revolution’s first battle on the Delaware River occurred on May 8 and 9 when the British frigates sailed up the river.  Thirteen row galleys built by the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety in 1775 repulsed the Roebuck and the Liverpool, demonstrating that the smaller yet agile boats could hold their own against the warships in shallow waters.  The outcome boosted the morale of Patriots in Philadelphia and beyond.  Norman proclaimed that the print was “JUST PUBLISHED” and available for sale (for two shillings and six pence plain or for three shillings and nine pence “elegantly coloured”) less than five weeks after the battle.  He likely did the engraving himself.

He did not, however, engrave “the Bostonians paying the excise-man, or taring and feathering” and many others from the “variety of elegant pictures” he sold.  Instead, he imported most of those.  The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering was one of five satirical prints engraved by Philip Dawe, printed by Robert Sayer and John Bennett, and sold in both England and the colonies.  The series included The Alternative of Williams-Burg, The Bostonians in Distress, The Patriotick Barber of New York, of the Captain in the Suds, and A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina.  Although some supporters of the American cause may have embraced these images, Dawe included details that critiqued or mocked their acts of resistance.  The depictions of the women signing a nonimportation agreement in A Society of Patriotic Ladies, for instance, demeaned them as silly, stupid, or disturbingly masculine.  An unattended child dumps a platter of food on the floor as a dog licks its face and urinates on a tea canister, suggesting that the women abandoned their appropriately feminine roles to participate in politics they did not understand.  In Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, five men dumping tea into the harbor can be seen in the background as Patriots force tea down the throat of John Malcom, a Loyalist tax collector, beneath the city’s Liberty Tree.  A noose hangs from one branch, commenting on the brutality of the Patriots and their methods.  Yet not all viewers necessarily agreed that the Patriots had gone too far.  Some of Norman’s customers in Philadelphia may have appreciated that image of the Boston Tea Party and subsequent events, just as they celebrated the row galleys forcing the Roebuck and the Liverpool to retreat.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 12, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Constitutional Gazette (June 12, 1776).

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Maryland Journal (June 12, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Gazette (June 12, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Journal (June 12, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Journal (June 12, 1776).

June 11

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Evening Post (June 11, 1776).

“I thus publicly deny ever carrying any such papers, or being privy to the carrying of them.”

As the printer and editor of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, Benjamin Towne made decisions about the news that appeared in his newspaper.  In the June 11, 1776, edition, for instance, he selected an open letter “To Mr. JAMES RANKIN, one of the Representatives for the country of York, in the province of Pennsylvania” from “A FREEMAN,” updates from Watertown, Massachusetts; New London, Connecticut; and New York, and local news from Philadelphia.  Yet that was not all the news that appeared in that issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  Advertisers also played a role in choosing which news to disseminate, paying for the opportunity to do so.  Hamilton and Leiper announced the dissolution of their partnership in yet another newspaper, Captain Thomas Houston alerted the public about four men who “DESERTED … from on board the Provincial armed galley Warren,” and “Dr. L. BUTTE, Surgeon-Dentist,” advised the public of his new location on Chestnut Street.

Thomas Cumpston also placed an advertisement with the intention of spreading news that was especially important to him.  “WHEREAS a report has been propagated about this city,” he declared, “that I carried certain Remonstrances to York Town in order to get them signed, therefore in justice to myself, I thus publicly deny ever carrying such papers, or being privy to the carrying of them.”  To make it clear, he asserted that “the report is groundless, and without foundation.”  The open letter to Rankin from “A FREEMAN” that filled the entire first page and spilled over onto the second concerned the circulation of the “certain Remonstrances” that Cumpston supposedly carried to York to gather signatures,” though “A FREEMAN” did not mention Cumpston.  That letter was a response to Rankin’s own open letter “To the WORTHY INHABITANTS of YORK COUNTY” in the June 8 edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  It also filled the entire first page and overflowed to the second page.  Rankin stated that he had been “injuriously treated by a Resolve of your County Committee, published in the several newspapers.”

The controversy revolved around Rankin’s reaction to the a resolution passed by the Second Continental Congress on May 15, 1776, a resolution that the “Assemblies and Conventions of the United Colonies, where no Government sufficient to the Exigencies of their affairs hath been hitherto established, … adopt such Government as shall in the Opinion of the Representatives of the People best conduce to the happiness and Safety of their Constituents in particular and America in General.”  In other words, each colony should establish its own government.  Tories and moderates took a different approach to this resolution than Patriots did.  In Pennsylvania, that resulted in both a “Remonstrance,” favored by Tories, and a “Protest,” favored by Patriots, circulating; “A FREEMAN” accused Rankin of embracing the former and ignoring the latter even though Rankin claimed that he wished to be guided by the views of all his constituents.  Rankin insisted that he acted from “love for the charter constitution of Pennsylvania” when he took into account “a Remonstrance …  sign[ed] by multitudes of the most respectable names in the city of Philadelphia, and the neighbouring counties, in opposition to the doctrines in the Protest.”  The “Remonstrance” argued that “public service has been, and might still be, carried on as vigorously by the Assembly of this province as by any other public body on the continent.”  Therefore, it was not necessary to create a new government.

Cumpston wanted no part of that controversy, at least not as an agent who circulated “certain Remonstrances … in order to get them signed.”  His advertisement served as a supplement to the news as he attempted to shape the narrative as far as his own actions were concerned.  Towne, the printer and editor, may not have had any interest in how the story that appeared on the first page of his newspaper had an impact on one resident of Philadelphia, but he did aim to generate revenue by selling advertising space.  Cumpston inserted a paid notice as a means of publishing news and rehabilitating his reputation as political debates in Pennsylvania intensified.