The Adverts 250 Project explores the history of advertising in eighteenth-century America. It features a daily image of an advertisement published in a colonial newspaper 250 years ago that day. Brief commentary accompanies each advertisement.
The Adverts 250 Project also publishes a daily digest of advertisements from the Slavery Adverts 250 Project.
Students from Colonial America, Revolutionary America, Research Methods, and Public History courses at Assumption University serve as guest curators for both the Adverts 250 Project and the Slavery Adverts 250 Project during the semesters those courses are taught. See the list of Guest Curators for more information about undergraduate guest curators.
Unless otherwise specified, all advertisements come from newspapers that have been digitized and made available via Accessible Archives (newspapers published in South Carolina), Colonial Williamsburg’s Digital Library (newspapers published in Virginia), Maryland State Archives’s Archives of Maryland Online (newspapers published in Maryland), and Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers (all other newspapers).
The Adverts 250 Project is conducted by Carl Robert Keyes, professor of history at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Daily updates: The digest of advertisements about enslaved men, women, and children publishes at 9:00 A.M. Eastern. The featured advertisement for the day publishes at 10:00 A.M. Eastern.
what a wonderful resource. an opportunity to feel the daily lives of the residents on a month to month experience. so happy i located you. holly j van ostrand
This is fascinating, and will be on my daily reading list. Thank you!
Thank you for surfacing these news articles from 250 years ago. It seems amazing, but not surprising, that just a few generations ago enslaving people was part of America’s daily life fabric. Your site certainly helps make explicit this major institution and cultural norm of the times.
For genealogists and historians your work provides a needed backdrop to fleshing out life stories.
I am wondering if you are also providing any type of summarized or quantitive view of your work? If so, this would be another valuable tool for those of us building context surrounding our ancestors’ stories and times.
Again, thank you for the great work.
I have been reading your page and absolutely love it. I was wanting to ask permission to add a link onto my genealogy site. I feel it would help my viewers as well.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~sweetpoe
thanks
Stace Pollard
I’m glad that you have enjoyed the Adverts 250 Project. Please feel free to add a link on your own genealogy site.
This is a great site! My hobby is fine photograpy of colonial era gravestones, and I found your great article about Philip Godfrid Kast who has an amazing Masonic gravestone in Derry, NH. I hope you don’t mind, but I shared a link to your article on my graveyard page.
Great site! I am doing research for an upcoming exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum and was pleased to see some material on Timothy Green, editor of the New London Gazette. We may be exhibiting a miniature portrait of his wife, Rebecca Spooner Green.