Month: March 2020

Slavery Advertisements Published March 15, 1770

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 for slaves – for sale, wanted to purchase, runaways, captured fugitives – 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 colonists 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. Colonists who did not own slaves were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing slaves or assisting in the capture of runaways. 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 slaveholders rather than the slaves themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

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

Mar 15 1770 - Maryland Gazette Slavery 1
Maryland Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Maryland Gazette Slavery 2
Maryland Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Maryland Gazette Slavery 3
Maryland Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - New-York Journal Slavery 1
New-York Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Pennsylvania Gazette Slavery 1
Pennsylvania Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 1
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 2
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 3
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 4
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 5
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 6
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Supplement Slavery 7
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 1
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 2
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 3
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 4
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 5
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 6
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 7
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Slavery 8
South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 1
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 2
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 3
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 4
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 5
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette Supplement Slavery 6
Supplement to the South-Carolina Gazette (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Virginia Gazette Rind Slavery 1
Virginia Gazette [Rind] (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Virginia Gazette Rind Slavery 2
Virginia Gazette [Rind] (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Virginia Gazette Supplement Rind Slavery 1
Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Rind] (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Virginia Gazette Supplement Rind Slavery 2
Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Rind] (March 15, 1770).

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Mar 15 1770 - Virginia Gazette Supplement Rind Slavery 3
Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Rind] (March 15, 1770).

March 14

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

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

Mar 14 - 3:14:1770 Georgia Gazette
Georgia Gazette (March 14, 1770).

“ORDERED, That the above Resolution be published in the next Gazette.”

In March 1770 the Union Society published a notice in the Georgia Gazette that announced its members “UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED, That a handsome PIECE OF PLATE be presented to JONATHAN BRYAN, Esquire, as a Token of the Sense we entertain of his upright Conduct, as a worthy Member of this SOCIETY, a real Friend to his Country in general, and the Province of GEORGIA in particular.”  For eighteenth-century readers in Savannah and throughout Georgia, such accolades likely needed no explanation.  Bryan played an important role in local politics as the imperial crisis intensified.

Harold E. Davis provides an overview of why Bryan received this honor from the Union Society.  First, he explains that Georgians formed a variety of private societies and organizations in the eighteenth century, not unlike their neighbors in Charleston.  (Jessica Choppin Roney examines similar civic organizations in colonial Philadelphia.)  Established in 1750, the Union Society “consisted mostly of craftsmen concerned with their interests as a class,” but over time enlarged its membership to include “men of more genteel professions.”[1]  The society supported a local school that admitted ten children a year.  “As pre-Revolutionary tensions sharpened,” Davis explains, “the Union Society became active in politics and rallied behind Jonathan Bryan, a member, when Bryan angered Governor Wright in 1769 by presiding over a meeting to discuss nonimportation of British goods.”[2]  Wright expelled Bryan from his council.  The Union Society, in turn, recognized Bryan’s advocacy with a “handsome PIECE OF PLATE” and the resolution published in the Georgia Gazette.

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, advertisements for consumer goods and services increasingly invoked the politics of the period, especially nonimportation as a commercial means of achieving political ends.  Yet advertisements that hawked merchandise that arrived in the colonies before nonimportation agreements went into effect or goods produced in the colonies rather than imported were not the only sorts of notices that addressed current events and offered commentary, directly or indirectly, on the news covered elsewhere in newspapers.  Given the close reading practices required to navigate eighteenth-century newspapers, the contents of advertisements, news items, and editorials all informed the others, with advertisements sometimes becoming editorials themselves.  That was certainly the case for the Union Society’s advertisement recognizing the civic virtues demonstrated by Jonathan Bryan.

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[1] Harold E. Davis, The Fledgling Province:  Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia 1733-1776 (Chapel Hill:  Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 1976; 2012), 169-170.

[2] Davis, Fledgling Province, 170.

Slavery Advertisements Published March 14, 1770

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 for slaves – for sale, wanted to purchase, runaways, captured fugitives – 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 colonists 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. Colonists who did not own slaves were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing slaves or assisting in the capture of runaways. 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 slaveholders rather than the slaves themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

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

Mar 14 1770 - Georgia Gazette Slavery 1
Georgia Gazette (March 14, 1770).

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Mar 14 1770 - Georgia Gazette Slavery 2
Georgia Gazette (March 14, 1770).

March 13

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

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

Mar 13 - 3:13:1770 South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

“A CHINA MANUFACTURE.”

In January 1770 an advertisement for “New China Ware” ran in the Pennsylvania Chronicle.  In it, the “CHINA PROPRIETORS in PHILADELPHIA” advised both retailers and consumers that they had set up production of porcelain “as good … as any heretofore manufactured at the famous factory in Bow, near London, and imported into the colonies.”  This enterprise aimed to provide colonists with alternatives to imported merchandise; both imported goods and “domestic manufactures” assumed new political significance when merchants and shopkeepers adopted nonimportation agreements to protest the duties levied on imported paper, glass, paint, lead, and tea in the Townshend Acts.

Two months later an advertisement about the “CHINA MANUFACTURE … now erecting” in Philadelphia appeared in the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal.  The proprietors, G. Bonnin and G.A. Morris, had two purposes in placing that notice:  recruiting workers and marketing their wares.  They reiterated the claims they made in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, proclaiming that “the Clays of America are productive of as good PORCELAIN as any hitherto manufactured in, and imported from England.”  Given those resources available to them, the proprietors also needed “Workmen skilled in the different branches of Throwing, Turning, Moulding, Pressing, and Handling.”  In a nota bene at the conclusion of the advertisement they proclaimed that “None will be employed who have not served their Apprenticeships in England, France, or Germany.”  Bonnin and Morris eschewed imported goods, but they still wished to draw on skills that had been learned on the other side of the Atlantic.  The quality of the “Clays of America” alone did not yield finished goods that competed with those produced in England.  To assist in acquiring the skilled workers they needed, the proprietors designated a local agent in Charleston.  They instructed “such in South-Carolina as are inclined to engage” that they would be “assisted in procuring their Passages to Philadelphia by Mr. EDWARD LIGHTFOOT.”

In addition to seeking workers, Bonnin and Morris made an appeal to prospective customers, “those who are inclined to encourage this Undertaking.”  They did not explicitly state that consumers had a duty to purchase goods produced in the colonies, but given the news and commentary that appeared elsewhere in the newspaper the proprietors likely depended on readers making such connections between consumption and politics.  Bonnin and Morris both invoked a sense of urgency and suggested existing demand for their wares, requesting customers “to be expeditious in forwarding their Commands” while also clarifying that “all Orders will be obeyed in Rotation” with “the earliest executed first.”  In so doing, they again repeated marketing strategies incorporated into their earlier advertisement in the Pennsylvania Chronicle.

Bonnin and Morris’s efforts to produce “domestic manufactures” and promote them to consumers were not merely local or even regional endeavors.  They looked far beyond Philadelphia and the Middle Colonies when recruiting workers and customers, further strengthening networks of both print and consumption that increasingly contributed to a sense of an imagined community that stretched from New England to Georgia.

Slavery Advertisements Published March 13, 1770

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 for slaves – for sale, wanted to purchase, runaways, captured fugitives – 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 colonists 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. Colonists who did not own slaves were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing slaves or assisting in the capture of runaways. 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 slaveholders rather than the slaves themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

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

Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 1
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

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Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 2
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

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Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 3
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

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Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 4
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

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Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 5
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

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Mar 13 1770 - South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal Slavery 6
South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (March 13, 1770).

March 12

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

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

Mar 12 - 3:12:1770 New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

“… from a Principle of Love to their Country.”

John Keating became a familiar figure in advertisements that appeared in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury and other newspapers in the late 1760s and early 1770s.  He operated a paper manufactory and presented his enterprise as providing a patriotic alternative to paper imported from Britain.  He objected to the duties that Parliament levied on imported paper in the Townshend Acts while simultaneously noting that consumers could foil such attempts to tax them by purchasing paper made locally.  He also frequently took the pages of the New York’s newspapers to encourage colonists to participate in the production of paper by collecting rags and turning them over to him to be transformed into paper, as he did in the March 12, 1770, edition of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury.

His entreaty commenced with a prologue that could have been part of a political tract rather than a newspaper advertisement: “THE Imposition of a Tax upon Goods imported from Great-Britain to her Colonies, altho’ a palpable Violation of their most sacred Rights, was not more injurious to them, than in itself impolitic, absurd and detrimental to Great-Britain, herself: Yet, notwithstanding the Absurdity of the Measure, the Contrivers of it had Cunning enough to lay the Tax upon Articles of necessary to us, that it was with Reason supposed we could not do without them, and therefore should be compelled by our Wants, to submit to the Imposition.”  From there, Keating outlined the nonimportation agreements that went into effect in several colonies, noting that “Friends to their Country” could play an important role in continuing to make paper available if only they would collect their rags and turn them over to the paper manufactory.  Keating estimated that there “are Rags abundantly sufficient for the Purpose” that colonists should save “from a Principle of Love to their Country.”

Keating frequently made such appeals, but on this occasion his exhortation may have gained additional urgency.  It ran next to a news item dated “BOSTON, March 1” that reported “the melancholy Affair at the North End.”  The Massachusetts Historical Society provides this summary of events that took place on February 22: “Ebenezer Richardson, a customs informer, fired a musket through a broken window in his house at a crowd of young men and boys who had been taunting customers of a store selling British imports.”  In addition to wounding others, Richardson killed Christopher Seider, age eleven.  His funeral on February 26 was a significant event.  According to the report in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, “a great Multitude of People assembled in the Houses and Streets to see the Funeral Procession, which departed “from Liberty-Tree.”  Killed less than two weeks before the Boston Massacre, Seider could be considered the first casualty of the American Revolution.  News of that “Bloody Massacre,” as Paul Revere labeled it, did not yet appear in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, but the death of Seider may have been sufficient to put Keating’s calls for colonists to collect rags into new perspective.  He offered a practical means for “Service they would do their Country, in whose Welfare their own is involved.”

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For a more complete accounting of the death and burial of Christopher Seider, see the series of articles by J.L. Bell on Boston 1775.

Slavery Advertisements Published March 12, 1770

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 for slaves – for sale, wanted to purchase, runaways, captured fugitives – 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 colonists 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. Colonists who did not own slaves were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing slaves or assisting in the capture of runaways. 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 slaveholders rather than the slaves themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

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

Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 1
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 2
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 3
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 4
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 5
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 6
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury Slavery 7
New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - Newport Mercury Slavery 1
Newport Mercury (March 12, 1770).

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Mar 12 1770 - Pennsylvania Chronicle Slavery 1
Pennsylvania Chronicle (March 12, 1770).

March 11

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Mar 11 - 3:8:1770 Pennsylvania Gazette
Pennsylvania Gazette (March 8, 1770).

“[For more new Advertisements, see the Fourth Page.]”

The first page of the March 8, 1770, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette consisted almost entirely of the masthead and news items, though the last column did carry three advertisements followed by the brief notice that instructed readers “[For more new Advertisements, see the Fourth Page.]”  Colonial printers and compositors made little effort to organize or classify the notices that ran in the page of their newspapers.  Advertisements for consumer goods and services ran alongside notices about wives, indentured servants, and horses that ran away and enslaved people who escaped from bondage.  Legal notices and announcements about ships preparing to sail for faraway ports were interspersed with those various kinds of advertisements.  Headlines had not yet been developed as a means of informing readers of the contents of articles.  As Joseph M. Adelman explains, “News was published by paragraphs with no headlines; the only way to determine what news was important was to read all of it.”

Advertisements did have headlines of sorts.  The Pennsylvania Gazette often featured generic headlines for advertisements, such as “TO BE SOLD” or “WANTED,” though many were more specific, “such as “AUCTION OF BOOKS.”  Advertisers sometimes used their names as their headlines, including “GARRETT & GEORGE MEADE” and “THOMAS STAPLETON, Brush-Maker.”  Some advertisements had introductory headers that provided overviews of the dense text that comprised the remainder of the advertisements, though most were too extensive to be considered headlines.  One of the more succinct versions extended five lines:  “Neat DRUGS and MEDICINES, / SOLD BY / ROBERT BASS, / APOTHECARY in MARKET-STREET, / Wholesale and Retail, at the usual moderate Rates.”  With few visual images, advertisements looked similar to news items.  All of the content of early American newspapers required close examination to determine purpose and significance.

Occasionally printers and compositors provided some aid intended to help readers navigate the contents of their newspapers.  Such was the case with the notice about “new Advertisements” on the “Fourth Page” of the March 8 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette.  That notice let readers interested in perusing new content know that they pass over the advertisements that filled half of the third page.  Those new advertisements were not organized by purpose.  Some had the headlines listed above, while most had no headline or introductory header at all.  Colonial printers and compositors still had work to do to make the contents of newspapers more accessible for their readers.  That brief notice, “[For more new Advertisements, see the Fourth Page,]” suggested that some were contemplating what could be done on that count.

March 10

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

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

Mar 10 - 3:10:1770 Providence Gazette
Providence Gazette (March 10, 1770).

“WEST’s … ACCOUNT of the TRANSIT of VENUS.”

John Carter, printer of the Providence Gazette, inserted a familiar advertisement in the March 10, 1770, edition.  It announced “WEST’s ALMANACKS, For the present Year, Likewise, his ACCOUNT of the TRANSIT of VENUS, To be sold by the Printer hereof.”  Carter also happened to be the printer of both of those volumes penned by West, an astronomer, mathematician, and professor at Rhode Island College (now Brown University).  Given the practices of colonial printers, it might be tempting to assume that Carter inserted the short advertisement in order to complete the final column on the last page of that issue when lacking other content … or that he once again attempted to rid himself of surplus copies of an almanac that became more obsolete with each passing day.  Careful examination of the news items in that issue of the Providence Gazette, however, suggest that Carter may have had another motive.

The second page featured an item reprinted “From the MASSACHUSETTS GAZETTE” that filled an entire column and then some.  It detailed “THE COMET, which we saw in the beginning of September,” declaring that it disappeared from visibility “for near six weeks in the neighbourhood of the Sun” and then “shewed itself again towards the end of October on the other side of the Sun.”  Unsigned, this account was probably written by John Winthrop (1714-1779), described by Frederick E. Brasch as “America’s First Astronomer.”  According to Brasch, “In 1769 Winthrop published an account in the Boston journals of the observations of the brilliant comet which appeared on September 1st.  The remarkable feature of this comet was the length of its tail.”[1]  Colonial printers frequently copied news items and editorials from one newspaper to another as they traded their publications through exchange networks.

Carter may have glimpsed an opportunity to tie a book about astronomy he had recently published an account of a comet that he republished, hoping that the latter incited demand for the former.  He could have intended for Winthrop’s extensive description of the comet to whet the appetites of readers interested in astronomy.  He offered them more, reminding them that he sold West’s “ACCOUNT of the TRANSIT of VENUS.”  The printer engaged in a sort of product placement.  Though certainly not as sophisticated as modern practices, it was an innovation in eighteenth-century America.

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[1] Frederick E. Brasch, “John Winthrop (1714-1779), America’s First Astronomer, and the Science of His Period, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 28, no. 165 (August-October 1916):  169.

March 9

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

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

Mar 9 - 3:9:1770 New-Hampshire Gazette
New-Hampshire Gazette (March 9, 1770).

“She will endeavour to Teach young MISSES the various Arts and Branches of NEEDLE WORK.”

When Ruth Jones prepared to open a school in Portsmouth in 1770, she placed an advertisement in the New-Hampshire Gazette to inform the community of her intent as well as attract students.  Given the curriculum, Jones restricted her pupils to girls or, as she put it, “young MISSES” who desired to learn “all the various Arts and Branches of NEEDLE WORK.”  She planned to teach “Needle Lace Work, Needle Work on Lawn, Flowering with Cruel, working Pocket Book with Irish Stitch, drawing and working of Twilights, marking of Letters, and plain Sewing.”  She added “&c.” (the eighteenth-century abbreviation for et cetera) to the end of the list to indicate that she possessed skills in other “Arts and Branches” of needlework that she could also transmit to pupils in her charge.  She depicted herself as much as an artisan as a schoolmistress, replicating the language of “Arts and Branches” of a trade that frequently appeared in newspaper advertisements placed by artisans of all sorts.

Jones supplemented her “NEEDLE WORK” curriculum with teaching “young Children to Read,” though she did not mention writing and arithmetic nor any advanced subjects that schoolmasters and many schoolmistresses included in their advertisements.  While she covered a vast array of techniques for using the needle, her curriculum was otherwise narrow and specialized.  She delivered instruction primarily in a homosocial environment.  Presumably any boys among her pupils learning to read were quite young rather than adolescents.  Parents of “young MISSES” did not need to worry about distractions caused by young men at Jones’s school.  The advertisement suggested that they would be able to focus on their stitches, interacting with each other but not the opposite sex.

Jones advanced two primary appeals in her advertisement.  She underscored her own expertise in needlework, listing the many “Arts and Branches” of the trade that she had mastered and could pass on to pupils.  She also sketched a homosocial learning environment in which young women could master the various stitches free from interruptions by young men.  She did not explicitly make the same appeals about tending to the manners and comportment of her female charges as other schoolmistresses made in their advertisements, but parents of prospective pupils may have considered that implied in Jones’s notice.