Month: June 2023

June 30

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

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

Pennsylvania Journal (June 30, 1773).

“A very grand and magnificent FIREWORK.”

Newspaper advertisements reveal some of the entertainments enjoyed by colonizers, including fireworks displays.  In the summer of 1773, for instance, John Laugeay organized and promoted a “very grand and magnificent FIREWORK, superior to any thing of the kind ever shewn here” for the “Ladies and Gentlemen” of Philadelphia who purchased tickets from him or at the London Coffee House.

His advertisement in the June 30 edition of the Pennsylvania Journal provided an extensive description of the different kinds of fireworks the audience would enjoy on July 14, including “one large Windmill, three large, and three small Wheels, six Pigeons, nine Serpentine Boxes, twelve Italian Candles, [and] six large, and six small Cherry Trees.”  In addition, he hoped to entice certain genteel gentlemen with a “superb Wheel of running fire, containing the arms of the antient and noble order of free and accepted Masons.”  Laugeay devised another spectacle that he expected would resonate with the entire audience, including those with concerns about the tense relationship between the colonies and Parliament.  He intended for them to experience a sense of patriotism and belonging within the empire when they watched “Two forts of twelve cannon each, one English and the other French, each firing at the other, wherein the English gains the victory.”  Beyond those displays, Laugeay promised a “great number of different changes too tedious to particularize.”  While the advertisement served as a preview, colonizers would have to see the entire exhibition to truly appreciate all that Laugeay had planned.

Although the fireworks were the primary draw, Laugeay described other elements of the experience he would create for his audience.  In a nota bene, he asked readers to take note of a “commodious Gallery built for the reception of company,” a comfortable place to socialize before the exhibition and then watch it once it began.  He also reported that “the band of music from the regiment will attend,” providing the eighteenth-century version of a soundtrack for the production.

“Ladies and Gentlemen who intend honouring the exhibition with their presence” had two weeks to acquire tickets.  Laugeay sketched for their imaginations an epic event that they would regret missing if they did not attend.  He likely hoped that his advertisement would do more than generate ticket sales.  After all, it had the potential to create a buzz among those who purchased tickets and conversed with friends and acquaintances about the upcoming event.  In turn, more people might get tickets of their own after hearing that so many others planned to attend.  Laugeay presented an opportunity not only to partake in the fireworks, the gallery, and the band, but also the sense of community that so many people, then and now, experience when attending concerts, sporting events, fireworks exhibitions, and other popular culture events.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 30, 1773

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Pennsylvania Gazette (June 30, 1773).

**********

Pennsylvania Gazette (June 30, 1773).

**********

Pennsylvania Journal (June 30, 1773).

**********

Pennsylvania Journal (June 30, 1773).

June 29

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

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

Essex Gazette (June 29, 1773).

“Our Customers are very willing their Papers should be read … by any Person who will be so kind as to forward them.”

Newspapers stolen before subscribers read them: the problem dates back to the eighteenth century … and probably even earlier.  It became such an issue in Massachusetts in the summer of 1773 that Samuel Hall and Ebenezer Hall, the printers of the Essex Gazette, inserted a notice addressing the situation.  The printers recognized that many subscribers who lived outside Salem “depend upon receiving their Papers by transient Conveyance” or by indirect means as postriders and others delivered bundles of letters and newspapers to designated locations, such as taverns or shops, with the expectation that members of those communities would then distribute the items to the intended recipients.

The Halls expressed their appreciation to “any Persons for their Favours in forwarding any Bundles to the respective Persons and Places that they are directed to.”  They also acknowledged that their “our Customers are very willing their Papers should be read, after the Bundles are opened, by any Person who will be so kind as to forward them to their Owners in due Season.”  However, all too often that did not happen.  Those who should have felt obliged to see that the newspapers reached the subscribers, especially after they read someone else’s newspaper for free, waited too long to do so or set them aside and forgot about them completely.  That being the case, the printers “earnestly” requested that “those who have heretofore taken up Paper only for their own Perusal, and afterwards thrown them by, or not taken any Care to send them to those who pay for them, would be so kind as not to take up any more.”  Instead, they should “leave them to the Care of those who are more kindly disposed” to see them delivered to the subscribers.

To make the point to those most in the need of reading it, the Halls declared that they “had the Names of some (living in Andover) … who, after having taken up and perused the Papers, and kept them several Days, were at last ashamed to deliver them to the Owners.”  The printers, as well the subscribers, considered this practice “very ungenerous.”  The Halls made a point of advising the culprits that they were aware of who read the newspapers without forwarding them to the subscribers.  They hoped that an intervention that did not involve naming names or directly contacting the perpetrators would be sufficient in altering such behavior.  They did not scold the offenders for reading the newspapers without subscribing.  Indeed, they framed that practice as something printers expected, but they did remind those readers that such generosity did not deserve the “very ungenerous” habit of hoarding and disposing of newspapers instead of forwarding them to the subscribers in a timely manner.  This was one of many challenges that colonial printers encountered in maintaining an infrastructure for disseminating information.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 29, 1773

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Courant (June 29, 1773).

**********

Connecticut Courant (June 29, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (June 29, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (June 29, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal (June 29, 1773).

June 28

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

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

New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (June 28, 1773).

“I have not yet been favoured with a sufficiency of subscribers to enable me to carry it into immediate execution.”

Samuel Gale, the author of The Complete Surveyor, looked for subscribers to publish his work for more than a year.  He distributed a handbill with the dateline “PHILADELPHIA, MARCH 12th, 1772,” to advise those who already subscribed for copies of the book that even though he already collected two hundred subscribers on his own and expected to receive others from local agents in other cities and towns “the number in the whole falls considerably short of my expectations.”  Furthermore, he anticipated that “this work will be large, and the expence of printing it considerably greater than would be defrayed by the present number of subscribers.”  Accordingly, others had advised him “to delay the printing of it a little longer” out of concerns that he “might perhaps be a loser by proceeding too hastily.”  In other words, Gale received sound advice that he would likely incur expenses that he could not pay if he took the book to press without enough subscribers to defray the costs.

To that end, he hoped “for many Gentlemen in America, to encourage this publication” by becoming subscribers or, if they had already subscribed, recruiting other subscribers.  To reassure prospective subscribers of the quality of The Complete Surveyor, Gale asserted that the “Manuscript Copy has met with the approbation of some of the best judges of these matters in America,” including William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; Alexander Colden, the Surveyor General of New York; David Rittenhouse, a prominent astronomer, mathematician, and surveyor in Philadelphia; and John Lukens, the Surveyor General of Pennsylvania.  Gale inserted short testimonials from each of these supports below a heading that called attention to “RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE ABOVE WORK.”  In addition, he hoped to entice subscribers by promising to insert an “Essay on the Variation of the Needle, written by the late Mr. LEWIS EVANS,” a renowned Welsh surveyor and geographer who published the General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America in 1755.  Gale concluded the handbill with a list of local agents who accepted subscriptions in a dozen towns from Boston to Savannah.  In addition, he declared that “all the Booksellers and Printers in America” accepted subscriptions.

Apparently, such an extensive network did not yield a sufficient number of subscribers.  At the end of June 1773, more than fifteen months later, Gale ran an advertisement in the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury.  He once again stated that the “manuscript copy has met with the greatest approbation,” yet “I have not yet been favoured with a sufficiency of subscribers to enable me to carry it into execution, without running too great a hazard.”  He requested that those who already subscribed give him a few more months to solicit subscribers among “the other well-wishers to mathematical learning among the public.”  He included the endorsements that previously appeared on the handbill and an even more extensive list of local agents, concluding with a note that “all the Booksellers and Printers in America and the West-India Islands” forwarded subscriptions to him.

Despite his best efforts, Gale never managed to attract enough subscribers to publish the book.  A note in the American Antiquarian Society’s catalog entry for the handbill states that “an insufficient number of subscriptions were received to encourage publication.”  Gale circulated advertising materials in more than one format, deployed testimonials from prominent experts in his field, offered a bonus essay as a premium, and made it convenient to subscribe via local agents throughout the colonies.  He developed a sophisticated marketing campaign, but it ultimately fell short of inciting sufficient demand for the book he wished to published.

Samuel Gale’s handbill promoting The Complete Surveyor. Courtesy Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 28, 1773

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Supplement to the Boston-Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (June 28, 1773).

**********

New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (June 28, 1773).

**********

New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (June 28, 1773).

**********

New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (June 28, 1773).

**********

Pennsylvania Packet (June 28, 1773).

**********

Pennsylvania Packet (June 28, 1773).

**********

Supplement to the Pennsylvania Packet (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

**********

South-Carolina Gazette (June 28, 1773).

June 27

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

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

New-York Journal (June 24, 1773).

“Carrying on his Business of Stay-making … in the neatest Taste, wore by the Ladies of Great Britain and France.”

John McQueen continued making and selling stays in New York in 1773.  He had been living, working, and advertising in the city for many years.  Similar to a corset, a pair of stays, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, consisted of a “laced underbodice, stiffened by the insertion of whale-bone (sometimes of metal or wood) worn by women (sometimes by men) to give shape and support to the figure.”  Furthermore, the “use of the plural is due to the fact that stays were originally (as they still are usually) made in two pieces laced together.”  John White included a woodcut depicting a pair of stays and lacing in his advertisement in the September 19, 1772, edition of the Pennsylvania Chronicle.

When he advertised in the New-York Journal in June 1773, McQueen emphasized his role as a supplier of “WHALE BONE” of “THE VERY BEST SORT” to other staymakers.  In addition, he stocked a “very neat and fashionable Assortment of STAYS, for Misses of three to fourteen Years of Age.”  Apparently, both staymakers and consumers did not believe that girls were ever too young to deploy these devices to shape their figures.”  Richard Norris, another staymaker in New York, regularly placed newspaper advertisements addressed to “young Ladies and growing Misses” as well as “Any Ladies uneasy in their shapes.”  Cultivating and preying on such anxieties was not invented by the modern beauty and fashion industries.

McQueen also resorted to another familiar refrain, declaring that he had on hand a “very neat Assortment of Goods for carrying on his Business of Stay-making, as usual, in the neatest Taste, wore by the Ladies of Great Britain and France.”  He often made such transatlantic connections, suggesting to prospective customers that he could assist them in demonstrating the sort of sophistication associated with cosmopolitan cities in Europe.  In 1766, he declared that he made stays “in the newest Fashion that is wore by the Ladies of Great-Britain or France.”  In another advertisement from 1767, he confided that he made “all sorts of Stays for Ladies, in the newest Fashions that is wore in London.”  Encouraging anxiety about the female form and making comparisons to fashionable elites became standard marketing strategies for McQueen and other staymakers in the eighteenth century.

June 26

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

Providence Gazette (June 26, 1773).

“Hand-Bills in particular done in a neat and correct Manner.”

Like many other colonial printers who published newspapers, but not all of them, John Carter, the printer of the Providence Gazette used the colophon at the bottom of the final page to promote services available at his printing office rather than merely giving the name and location of the printer.  In the early 1770s, the colophon for the Providence Gazette regularly advised that customers could place orders for job printing “at Shakespear’s Head, … where all Manner of Printing-Work is performed with Care and Expedition.”  Job printing orders included broadsides, trade cards, handbills, and blanks (or forms) of various sorts.

On April 25, 1772, Carter added an additional line to the colophon, advising prospective customers about “Hand-Bills in particular done in a neat and correct Manner, at a very short Notice, and on reasonable Terms.”  Among the newspaper printers who inserted extended colophons that doubled as advertisements for their printing offices, others also gave handbills special emphasis.  In Boston, Isaiah Thomas, the printer of the Massachusetts Spy, included a note in his colophon that declared, “Small HAND-BILLS at an Hour’s Notice.”  In Philadelphia, the colophon for William Goddard’s Pennsylvania Chronicle concluded with “Blanks and Hand-Bills, in particular, are done on the shortest Notice, in a neat and correct Manner.”  Solomon Southwick, the printer of the Newport Mercury, on the other hand, focused on “all Kinds of BLANKS commonly used in this Colony.”

That several printers made a point of including handbills among the services listed in their colophons suggests that they regularly received orders for such items, likely far more orders than those examples in research libraries, historical societies, and private collections suggest.  That Thomas proclaimed that his printing office could produce handbills so quickly further testifies to the likelihood that merchants, shopkeepers, and others distributed handbills as an alternative or as a supplement to newspaper notices, creating a more visible and vibrant culture of advertising in early America, especially in urban ports, than surviving primary sources alone indicate.  Since handbills were intended to be ephemeral and disposable, colonizers did not save and preserve them in the same manner that newspaper printers and some subscribers compiled complete runs of many eighteenth-century newspapers, complete with the advertisements they contained.

Slavery Advertisements Published June 26, 1773

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 colonial American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Providence Gazette (June 26, 1773).

June 25

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , ,

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

New-Hampshire Gazette (June 25, 1773).

“All the PATENT MEDICINES.”

In the summer of 1773, Joseph Tilton took to the pages of the New-Hampshire Gazette to advertise a “large and fresh Assortment of Druggs, Medicines, and Groceries” that he recently imported and stocked at his shop in Exeter.  He offered abrief overview of some of those groceries, such as “fresh Raisins, Turkey Figgs, Currants, [and] Olive Oil.”  Tilton also listed a variety of medical equipment, including “SURGEON’s pocket Instruments, best London Lancetts, … ivory Syringes, … [and] Apothecaries Scales and Weights.”  This gave prospective customers some sense of his merchandise, even if Tilton did not supply an exhaustive catalog.

When it came to that “Assortment of Druggs, [and] Medicines,” however, Tilton succinctly stated that he stocked “all the PATENT MEDICINES commonly Advertised” and did not go into further detail.  He expected that prospective customers were already familiar with the many different kinds of patent medicines frequently imported from England and the uses for each, making it unnecessary to name Keyser’s Pills, Daffy’s Elixir, James’s Fever Powder, Godfrey’s Cordial, Stoughton’s Bitters, Turlington’s Balsam, or any of the other patent medicines frequently listed in advertisements placed by apothecaries and shopkeepers.

The partnership of Munson and Mather adopted the same approach in their advertisement that appeared in the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post-Boy on June 25, the same day that Tilton’s notice ran in the New-Hampshire Gazette.  Munson and Mather declared that they carried a “fresh and universal Assortment of Drugs and Medicines” that included “Most of the Patent Medicines” familiar to consumers throughout the colonies.  Those patent medicines were so well known by their brands and their distribution in major ports and smaller towns so ubiquitous in eighteenth-century America neither Tilton nor Munson and Mather considered it necessary to exert much effort in marketing them beyond informing “Customers in Town and Country” where they could purchase “all the PATENT MEDICINES.”