Month: May 2022

May 4

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update, Guest Contribution , , , , , ,

GUEST CURATOR: Tyler Reid

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

Supplement to the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

“Be cautious, there are many … counterfeit watches … so bad they cannot be rendered useful.”

John Simnet, a clock- and watchmaker, created this advertisement.  It displays a competitive market in 1772. Simnet emphasizes his “Term of Apprenticeship to Mr. Webster, Exchange Alley, London.”  He thought that his qualifications mattered.  He also mentioned his expertise in cleaning watches and fitting glasses. These skills mattered.  In an article about clocks and clockmakers in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, Michelle Smiley states that clockmaking “was considered an intellectual profession requiring great artisanal skill and scientific knowledge.”  In addition, “the mathematical precision and mechanical intricacy of the profession put it at a superior rank to the crafts of blacksmithing and carpentry.”  In his advertisement, Simnet had a big ego about his skill and knowledge, especially being trained in England and voyaging to the colonies.  He also complained about “counterfeit Watches … so bad they cannot be rendered useful.”  He believed that colonists should be careful when buying watches from others because they might end up receiving broken merchandise.  He wanted customers to think of him as reliable, as someone who sold only good watches that worked well.  According to his advertisements, they could trust him because of his training in England.

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ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY:  Carl Robert Keyes

When students in my classes submit their proposed advertisements for approval before moving to the research and writing phases of contributing the Adverts 250 Project, I often recognize the advertisers because I have already perused the newspapers to identify which notices belong in the Slavery Adverts 250 Project.  I did not simply recognize the advertiser that Tyler selected for his entry.  Instead, John Simnet has become very familiar to me over the past three years as I have traced his advertisements in the New-Hampshire Gazette in 1769 and 1770 and then in newspapers published in New York in the early 1770s.  I consider Simnet the most notorious of the advertisers featured on the Adverts 250 Project because he regularly disseminated negative advertisements that demeaned his competitors as much as they promoted his own skill, expertise, training, and experience.  In both Portsmouth and New York, he participated in bitter feuds with competitors in the public prints, sometimes demeaning character as well as their abilities.

Tyler was not yet familiar with Simnet when he selected this advertisement, one of several variations that Simnet published in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury and the New-York Journal in the spring of 1772.  He chose it because the headline for “WATCHES” caught his interest.  He wanted to learn more about clock- and watchmakers in early America.  This presented an opportunity for me to once again dovetail my teaching and my research, a pedagogical moment that could not be planned in advance when inviting students to select any advertisements they wished to feature.  They usually focus on a single advertisement, an appropriate approach for students working this intensively with primary sources for the first time.  They make all sorts of connections between their advertisements and commerce, politics, and daily life in eighteenth-century America.  Yet we have fewer opportunities to examine the advertisers and their marketing campaigns.  When Tyler chose Simnet’s advertisement from among the hundreds that he might have selected from the first week of May 1772, that gave all the students in my Revolutionary America class a chance to hear more about the clock- and watchmaker’s long history of placing cantankerous advertisements that deviated from the norms of the period.  This context better humanized Simnet, even if it did not make him particularly likeable.  Each advertisement represents a snapshot of a particular moment in the past, but I also underscored the value of examining multiple advertisements, placed over weeks or even years, as a means of constructing an even more robust understanding of the experiences of the advertisers and their world.

Welcome, Guest Curator Tyler Reid

Carl Robert Keyes Uncategorized , ,

Tyler Reid is a sophomore at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He plans to major in Cybersecurity. Originally from Needham, Massachusetts, he has grown quite curious about the history of America and different interpretations of the past. Computers and technology have always been attractive to him, helping to explain why he chose to go down the cybersecurity route. Outside of the classroom, Tyler plays football at the university. He started playing when he was in the second grade.  He has loved the sport deeply ever since. Although he had played the position of running back almost his entire life, during the spring semester of his first year at college he was faced with a challenge of switching to slot receiver for the Greyhounds.  Tyler made his contributions to the Adverts 250 Project and the Slavery Adverts 250 Project when enrolled in HIS 359 Revolutionary America, 1763-1815, in Fall 2021.

Welcome, guest curator Tyler Reid!

Slavery Advertisements Published May 4, 1772

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

GUEST CURATOR: Tyler Reid

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Newport Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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Supplement to the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 4, 1772).

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Pennsylvania Packet (May 4, 1772).

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Pennsylvania Packet (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

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South-Carolina and American General Gazette (May 4, 1772).

May 3

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

Providence Gazette (May 2, 1772).

“At the Sign of the GREYHOUND.”

In the spring of 1772, Nathaniel Wheaton advertised a “fine Assortment of Spring and Summer GOODS” that he recently imported to Providence “by the last Vessels from England.”  He pledged to sell these items “cheaper than he has yet done,” promising bargains for prospective customers.  To attract attention to his appeals to consumer choice, that “fine assortment,” and low prices, those low prices, he adorned his advertisement in the Providence Gazette with an image of a dog.  He gave his location as “the Sign of the GREYHOUND, between the Baptist Meeting-House and the Church,” suggesting that the woodcut was intended to depict a greyhound.  Readers may not have recognized the breed at a glance.

Despite the image’s shortcomings, it enhanced Wheaton’s marketing efforts.  It was the only woodcut incorporated into an advertisement in the May 2, 1772, edition of the Providence Gazette.  Elsewhere in the issue, only the masthead featured an image.  That almost certainly made readers take note of Wheaton’s advertisement, especially considering that most others consisted of dense paragraphs of text.  In addition, the image contributed to creating a brand for Wheaton, giving his business a visual identity that colonizers encountered in more than one place.  They saw his sign when they traversed the streets of Providence and they glimpsed his advertisements in the Providence Gazette.  Wheaton may have also distributed broadsides, handbills, trade cards, or billheads that also bore an image purported to be a greyhound.

Other advertisers mentioned their shop signs.  Thurber and Cahoon, for instance, announced that they did business at “the Sign of the BUNCH of GRAPES, in CONSTITUTION-STREET.”  Tillinghast and Holroyd ran a store “at the Sign of the ELEPHANT.”  Their advertisements hint at the rich visual culture associated with commerce in urban ports in eighteenth-century America.  For his part, Wheaton expanded that visual culture into the most common media of the era, newspapers, increasing the chances that prospective customers would peruse the copy of his advertisement.  Even if they did not, he gained greater visibility for his shop and name recognition than competitors who did not insert images with into their notices.

May 2

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

Postscript to the Censor (May 2, 1772).

“Just Arrived, The Cream of Goods.”

Gilbert DeBlois placed his advertisement for “The Cream of Goods” imported from England in several newspapers published in Boston in the spring of 1772, including the Censor.  Ezekiel Russell commenced publication of the Censor, more “a political magazine rather than a newspaper,” in November 1771.[1]  He eventually supplemented it with a half sheet Postscript that looked more like a newspaper.  Instead of carrying essays and editorials exclusively, it also featured news and advertising.  Those efforts to diversify the publication, however, did not broaden its appeal to readers in Boston.  As Isaiah Thomas, the ardent patriot who published the Massachusetts Spy and wrote The History of Printing in America (1810), noted, “the circulation of the paper was confined to a few of their own party,” Tories who sympathized with the British government.[2]  Given his politics, DeBlois numbered among that party.  He eventually left Boston as part of the British evacuation in 1776.  He was among the advertisers in the final issue of the Censordistributed by Russell.

Thomas made his contempt for the Censor clear, demeaning it for being “discontinued before the revolution of a year from its first publication.”  In a footnote, Thomas also provided details about a notorious contributor to the Censor.  “Dr. Benjamin Church, a reputed whig, who when the Revolutionary war commenced was appointed surgeon general of the American army, but was soon after arrested and confined, being detected in a traitorous correspondence with the British army in Boston, I have been informed by a very respectable person whom I have long known, was a writer for the Censor.”  Thomas did not reveal his source, but he did state that “[t]his person, then an apprentice to Russell, was employed to convey, in a secret manner, the doctor’s manuscripts to the press, and proof sheets from the press to the doctor.”  Thomas asserted that Church engaged in skullduggery long before his infamous letter to General Thomas Gage was intercepted and decoded in October 1775.  Some historians have suggested that Church’s case was more nuanced than Thomas allowed, as did Church at the time.  Thomas apparently had little use for Church’s rationalizations that he deliberately sent misinformation to the British to ward off attacks against patriots who lacked ammunition, just as he had little use for the Censor.  For a few months, the Postscript to the Censor increased the number of publications that disseminated advertising in Boston, but Russell did not attract enough subscribers or advertisers to continue producing the weekly political magazine and its supplement.

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[1] Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 (Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society, 1947), 275.

[2] Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers (1810; New York: Weathervane Books, 1970), 285.

Slavery Advertisements Published May 2, 1772

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

GUEST CURATOR: Tyler Reid

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Providence Gazette (May 2, 1772).

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Providence Gazette (May 2, 1772).

May 1

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

New-Hampshire Gazette (May 1, 1772).

“Clocks & Watches Clean’d in the Cheapest and best Manner.”

Nathaniel Sheaff Griffith made brief appeals to price and quality in an advertisement that ran in the May 1, 1772, edition of the New-Hampshire Gazette.  He succinctly informed prospective customers that he “Clean’d” clocks and watches “in the Cheapest and best Manner” at his shop in Portsmouth.  In addition, he sold “Silver plated Shoe and Knee-Buckles” and other goods.

While this advertisement may not seem noteworthy when considered alone or alongside other notices that ran in the same issue, regular readers of the New-Hampshire Gazette likely remembered other advertisements placed by Griffith or that mentioned Griffith.  For a period of eighteen months, Griffith participated in a feud with another clock- and watch-maker, John Simnet, an exceptionally public disagreement undertaken in advertisements in the colony’s only newspaper.  Simnet had relocated to New Hampshire after several decades working in London.  Like many artisans who crossed the Atlantic, he attempted to leverage his training and experience in the cosmopolitan center of the empire to woo customers unfamiliar with his work.  His competitors, including Griffith, benefited from having established a reputation among local consumers.  Simnet adopted more aggressive tactics than most artisans, not only promoting his own credentials but also proclaiming that his rivals did inferior work that actually damaged the clocks and watches they pretended to repair.  He singled out Griffith in particular, eventually denigrating his character and intellect as well as his skill.  For his part, Griffith accused the newly-arrived Simnet of being an itinerant likely to abscond with the watches that colonizers entrusted to him.  In general, however, Griffith was much less abusive toward Simnet than Simnet was toward him, at least in the public prints.

After a year and a half in Portsmouth, Simnet relocated once again, this time to New York.  He placed fairly neutral advertisements in the newspapers published in the bustling port, at least at first, but eventually found himself embroiled in another argument with a competitor.  His advertisements became increasingly colorful as he devised new ways to denigrate clock- and watchmaker James Yeoman.

Back in Portsmouth and its environs, many readers of the New-Hampshire Gazette likely remembered the altercation between Griffith and Simnet when they encountered new advertisements from Simnet, no matter how brief or neutral.  Did those memories influence whether they hired Griffith?  Did they think about some of the insults that Griffith leveled at Simnet?  Did they put any stock in Simnet’s accusations against Griffith or dismiss the cantankerous rantings of the interloper?  Did they credit Griffith for the restraint he showed when he eventually decided that the best response to Simnet was to ignore him?  Did they recall being entertained by the vitriolic exchanges, even if they had no need to hire artisans to clean or repair their clocks and watches?  Griffith’s brief announcement published in the spring of 1772 was just one notice among a series of advertisements that likely shaped public perceptions of his business.

Slavery Advertisements Published May 1, 1772

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

GUEST CURATOR: Tyler Reid

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Journal (May 1, 1772).

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New-Hampshire Gazette (May 1, 1772).

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New-London Gazette (May 1, 1772).