Month: January 2026

January 20

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

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

Constitutional Gazette (January 20, 1776).

“Now selling by WILLIAM GREEN, Bookseller, in Maiden Lane, New-York.  COMMON SENSE.”

Just eleven days after the first newspaper advertisement for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared in the January 9, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post, the first advertisement for the inflammatory political pamphlet ran in a newspaper outside of Philadelphia.  Within a week, Robert Bell, the publisher of the first edition, inserted advertisements in all six newspapers printed in Philadelphia, including Henrich Millers Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote.  One of the most savvy and influential American printers and booksellers of the eighteenth century, Bell quickly dispatched copies of the pamphlet to New York.  On January 20, the Constitutional Gazette carried an advertisement that nearly replicated those in Philadelphia’s newspapers.

That notice announced the publication of the pamphlet and stated that it was “now selling by ROBERT BELL, in Third-Street, Philadelphia” for two shillings per copy.  Yet prospective customers did not need to send to Philadelphia to acquire copies because the pamphlet was “now selling by WILLIAM GREEN, Bookseller, in Maiden Lane, New-York.”  Like the other advertisements, the notice in the Constitutional Gazette did not identify Paine as the author.  It gave the title of the work, “COMMON SENSE; ADDRESSED TO THE INHABITANTS OF AMERICA,” and listed the various headings for the sections of the pamphlet.  Readers may have already heard about a new pamphlet that took Philadelphia by storm and some of the arguments for declaring independence that it contained, yet such an outline likely told them more than they already knew and whetted their appetites for more.  What did the pamphlet say about “Monarchy and Hereditary succession”?  What kinds of “Thoughts on the present state of American affairs” did it contain?  What did the author think of “the present Ability of America” in its contest against Great Britain?  Even before they saw anything in print, most residents of New York probably first learned about Common Sense via word of mouth.  The advertisement in the Constitutional Gazette offered readers an opportunity to move beyond excited conversations about what they heard the pamphlet said about monarchy, government, and the prospects for declaring independence to obtaining their own copies and reading the treatise for themselves.  It did not take long for advertisements for Common Sense to move beyond Philadelphia’s newspapers to the Constitutional Gazette in New York and other newspapers in other cities and towns.

Slavery Advertisements Published January 20, 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.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

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

Constitutional Gazette (January 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (January 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Pinkney] (January 20, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published January 20, 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.

Constitutional Gazette (January 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (January 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Ledger (January 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Ledger (January 20, 1776).

Happy Birthday, Isaiah Thomas!

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features , , , , ,

Isaiah Thomas, patriot printer and founder of the American Antiquarian Society, was born on January 19 (New Style) in 1749 (or January 8, 1748/49, Old Style).  It’s quite an historical coincidence that the three most significant printers in eighteenth-century America — Benjamin Franklin, Isaiah Thomas, and Mathew Carey — were all born in January.

isaiah_thomas1818
Isaiah Thomas (January 30, 1739 – April 4, 1831). American Antiquarian Society.

The Adverts 250 Project is possible in large part due to Thomas’s efforts to collect as much early American printed material as he could, originally to write his monumental History of Printing in America.  The newspapers, broadsides, books, almanacs, pamphlets, and other items he gathered in the process eventually became the initial collections of the American Antiquarian Society.  That institution’s ongoing mission to acquire at least one copy of every American imprint through 1876 has yielded an impressive collection of eighteenth-century advertising materials, including newspapers, magazine wrappers, trade cards, billheads, watch papers, book catalogs, subscription notices, broadsides, and a variety of other items.  Exploring the history of advertising in early America — indeed, exploring any topic related to the history, culture, and literature of early America at all — has been facilitated for more than two centuries by the vision of Isaiah Thomas and the dedication of the curators and other specialists at the American Antiquarian Society over the years.

Thomas’s connections to early American advertising were not limited to collecting and preserving the items created on American presses during the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods.  Like Mathew Carey, he was at the hub of a network he cultivated for distributing newspapers, books, and other printed goods — including advertising to stimulate demand for those items.  Sometimes this advertising was intended for dissemination to the general public (such as book catalogs and subscription notices), but other times it amounted to trade advertising (such as circular letters and exchange catalogs intended only for fellow printers, publishers, and booksellers).

Thomas also experimented with advertising on wrappers that accompanied his Worcester Magazine, though he acknowledged to subscribers that these wrappers were ancillary to the publication:  “The two outer leaves of each number are only a cover to the others, and when the volume is bound may be thrown aside, as not being a part of the Work.”[1]

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Detail of Advertising Wrapper, Worcester Magazine (Second Week of April, 1786).

Thomas’s patriotic commitment to freedom of the press played a significant role in his decision to develop advertising wrappers.  As Thomas relays in his History of Printing in America, he discontinued printing his newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy, after the state legislature passed a law that “laid a duty of two-thirds of a penny on newspapers, and a penny on almanacs, which were to be stamped.”  Such a move met with strong protest since it was too reminiscent of the Stamp Act imposed by the British two decades earlier, prompting the legislature to repeal it before it went into effect.  On its heels, however, “another act was passed, which imposed a duty on all advertisements inserted in the newspapers” printed in Massachusetts.  Thomas vehemently rejected this law as “an improper restraint on the press. He, therefore, discontinued the Spy during the period that this act was in force, which was two years. But he published as a substitute a periodical work, entitled ‘The Worcester Weekly Magazine,’ in octavo.”[2] This weekly magazine lasted for two years; Thomas discontinued it and once again began printing the Spy after the legislature repealed the objectionable act.

jan-30-advertising-wrapper-worcester-magazine-4th-week-may-1786
Third Page of Advertising Wrapper, Worcester Magazine (Fourth Week of May, 1786).

Isaiah Thomas was not interested in advertising for its own sake to the same extent as Mathew Carey, but his political concerns did help to shape the landscape of early American advertising.  Furthermore, his vision for collecting American printed material preserved a variety of advertising media for later generations to admire, analyze, ponder, and enjoy.  Happy 277th birthday, Isaiah Thomas!

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[1] Isaiah Thomas, “To the CUSTOMERS for the WORCESTER MAGAZINE,” Worcester Magazine, wrapper, second week of April, 1786.

[2] Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers, and an Account of Newspapers, vol. 2 (Worcester, MA: Isaac Sturtevant, 1810), 267-268.

January 19

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

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

Essex Journal (January 19, 1776).

“He is determined to be regularly supplyed with all the news-papers on the Continent.”

On January 19, 1776, John Mycall and Henry-Walter Tinges, the printers of the Essex Journal, announced the end of their partnership.  Tinges had been a founding partner, commencing publication of the newspaper in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Isaiah Thomas, the printer of the Massachusetts Spy, in December 1773.  As the junior partner, Tinges oversaw the printing office, including publication of the Essex Journal, in Newburyport, while Thomas tended to his printing office in Boston.  That initial partnership lasted only eight months before Thomas withdrew and Tinges began a new partnership with Ezra Lunt in August 1774.  That partnership also lasted less than a year.  In July 1775, Lunt exited and Mycall joined as Tinges’s new partner.  Seven months later, Tinges announced that he “determined to discontinue the Printing-business for the present in this Town” and the “co-partnership between JOHN MYCALL and me is mutually dissolved,” though Mycall “still continues the Printing-business as usual.”  Mycall published the Essex Journal on his own for just over a year.  It folded in February 1777, one of several newspapers that ceased publication during the Revolutionary War.

For his part, Mycall inserted his own advertisement stating that the partnership ended and that he “intends to continue supplying those with this paper who have been his Customers while in partnership.”  He outlined his plan for supplying subscribers with news, declaring that he “is determined to be regularly supplyed with all the news-papers on the Continent, and select such pieces only as he thinks will most gratify his Customers.”  That was the common practice for generating content in printing offices throughout the colonies.  Printers participated in extensive exchange networks, liberally reprinting, word for word, items that appeared in the newspapers they received.  Thus an item originally published in a newspaper in Charleston, for instance, could be reprinted from newspaper to newspaper in Williamsburg, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Hartford, and Boston before appearing in the Essex Journal in Newburyport.  Mycall made a point that he would “send every Thursday for the Cambridge paper, unless prevented by extreme bad weather, which will enable him to publish before the Post arrives in Town.”  He referred to the New-England Chronicle, published Samuel Hall and Ebenezer Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  During the siege of Boston, most of the newspapers previously printed in that city ceased or suspended publication or moved to other towns.  The Halls relocated the Essex Gazette, published in Salem, to Cambridge and renamed it the New-England Chronicle when it became the new paper of record for the latest news about the Massachusetts government and the Continental Army under the command of George Washington.  Mycall underscored that he quickly received the latest edition of the New-England Chronicle, printed on Thursdays, and incorporated “useful intelligence” into the Essex Journal, published on Fridays, ahead of the schedule for post riders to arrive in Newburyport.  In the eighteenth century, Mycall delivered breaking news to readers of the Essex Journal.

Slavery Advertisements Published January 19, 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.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

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

Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy (January 19, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (January 19, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (January 19, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (January 19, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (January 19, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (January 19, 1776).

January 18

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

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

New-York Journal (January 18, 1775).

“RULES AND ORDERS FOR REGULATING THE MILITIA, Of the Colony of NEW-YORK.”

Advertisements for military manuals began appearing regularly in many American newspapers in 1775 and 1776.  They appeared most frequently in New England, where the first battles of the Revolutionary War occurred, and in Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress met, but not solely in those places.  On January 18, 1776, John Holt, the printer of the New-York Journal, ran an advertisement for “RULES AND ORDERS FOR REGULATING THE MILITIA, Of the Colony of NEW-YORK, Recommended by the PROVINCIAL CONGRESS, December 20, 1775, and ordered to be PUBLISHED, with an APPENDIX.”

That pamphlet presents a bibliographical mystery.  On September 24, 1775, the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercurycarried the “RULES and ORDERS for regulating the Militia of the Colony of New-York, recommended by the Provincial Congress, August 22, 1775,” filling almost two columns on the first page and spilling onto the second page.  By then, Holt had been advertising a twelve-page pamphlet featuring the “RULES AND ORDERS” for nearly a month.  His first notice appeared in the August 31 edition of the New-York Journal.  He may not have appreciated Hugh Gaine’s decision to disseminate the same content for free, potentially undercutting sales of the pamphlet, yet the pamphlet offered a different format that readers, especially those who had cause the consult the manual regularly, likely found more convenient.  Gaine presented information as a service to the public, while Holt packaged the same content for practical use by officers and others.

The advertisements for Holt’s first edition of the “RULES AND ORDERS” did not mention an appendix.  That first appeared in his advertisement from January 18, 1776, along with an assertion that the “PROVINCIAL CONGRESS” adopted the “RULES AND ORDERS” on December 20, 1775, rather than August 22, 1775.  Had the provincial congress revisited the issue and recommended the same (or revised) “RULES AND ORDERS” after just four months?  Or did the new advertisement feature an error in the date?  What, if anything, did the appendix contain that was not part of the original pamphlet?  Unfortunately, no copy of a pamphlet with a title that includes the date December 20, 1775, survives.  Holt regularly inserted advertisements for it in the New-York Journal for three months, suggesting that he did indeed stock such a pamphlet (but not revealing how many he sold).  How and whether that pamphlet differed from the first one remains a mystery.

Slavery Advertisements Published January 18, 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.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

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

Connecticut Journal (January 18, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (January 18, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (January 18, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (January 18, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (January 18, 1776).

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New-England Chronicle (January 18, 1776).

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New-England Chronicle (January 18, 1776).

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New-York Journal (January 18, 1776).

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New York Packet (January 18, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (January 18, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published January 18, 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.

Pennsylvania Evening Post (January 18, 1776).

Happy Birthday, Benjamin Franklin!

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features , , , ,

Today is an important day for specialists in early American print culture, for Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 (January 6, 1705, Old Style), in Boston. Among his many other accomplishments, Franklin is known as the “Father of American Advertising.” Although I have argued elsewhere that this title should more accurately be bestowed upon Mathew Carey (in my view more prolific and innovative in the realm of advertising as a printer, publisher, and advocate of marketing), I recognize that Franklin deserves credit as well. Franklin is often known as “The First American,” so it not surprising that others should rank him first among the founders of advertising in America.

benjamin-franklin
Benjamin Franklin (Joseph Siffred Duplessis, ca. 1785).  National Portrait Gallery.

Franklin purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729. In the wake of becoming printer, he experimented with the visual layout of advertisements that appeared in the weekly newspaper, incorporating significantly more white space and varying font sizes in order to better attract readers’ and potential customers’ attention. Advertising flourished in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which expanded from two to four pages in part to accommodate the greater number of commercial notices.

jan-17-pennsylvania-gazette-19-161736
Advertisements with white space, varying sizes of font, capitals and italics, and a woodcut from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette (December 9-16, 1736).

Many historians of the press and print culture in early America have noted that Franklin became wealthy and retired as a printer in favor of a multitude of other pursuits in part because of the revenue he collected from advertising. Others, especially David Waldstreicher, have underscored that this wealth was amassed through participation in the colonial slave trade. The advertisements for goods and services featured in the Pennsylvania Gazette included announcements about buying and selling enslaved men, women, and children as well as notices offering rewards for those who escaped from bondage.

jan-17-pennsylvania-gazette-slave-19-161736
Advertisement for an enslaved woman and an enslaved child from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette (December 9-16, 1736).

In 1741 Franklin published one of colonial America’s first magazines, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, for all the British Plantations in America (which barely missed out on being the first American magazine, a distinction earned by Franklin’s competitor, Andrew Bradford, with The American Magazine or Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies). The magazine lasted only a handful of issues, but that was sufficient for Franklin to become the first American printer to include an advertisement in a magazine (though advertising did not become a standard part of magazine publication until special advertising wrappers were developed later in the century — and Mathew Carey was unarguably the master of that medium).

general-magazine
General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, For all the British Plantations in America (January 1741).  Library of Congress.

In 1744 Franklin published an octavo-sized Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books, including 445 entries. This is the first known American book catalogue aimed at consumers (though the Library Company of Philadelphia previously published catalogs listing their holdings in 1733, 1735, and 1741). Later that same year, Franklin printed a Catalogue of Books to Be Sold at Auction.

Franklin pursued advertising through many media in eighteenth-century America, earning recognition as one of the founders of American advertising. Happy 320th birthday, Benjamin Franklin!