The public prints

by Clark, Charles E

Newspapers reflect the world as perceived by its writers and readers. They illustrate assumptions in a society about the nature of news and history, the practice of certain literary styles, the political and commercial structure of communities, and the larger process by which culture is transmitted and transformed. Comprehensive in scope and narrative in style, The Public Prints is the first study of the role of the earliest newspapers in eighteenth-century American society and culture. In the hands of Charles E. Clark, American newspaper publishing becomes a branch of the English world of print in a story that begins in the bustling streets of late-seventeenth-century London and moves to the provincial towns of England and across the Atlantic . While Clark's most detailed attention in America is to the three multi-newspaper towns of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, evidence from Williamsburg, Charleston, and Barbados also contributes to generalizations about the craft and business