Ready Reference: United States Material at the British Library Newspaper Library Pt. I

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In the last issue of this Newsletter we reported the publication by the British Library's Eccles Centre of a guide to the Newspaper Library's holdings of newspapers published in the United States and Canada. The fact that the guide lists nearly 1400 United States titles, excluding the 780 single issues in the 1858 Stevens collection and the substantial collection of trade journals, illustrates the extent of the Library's impressive and varied collection of US material. The purpose of this article is to bring this material to the attention of readers and therefore encourage its greater use.

Early American newspapers

The situation regarding eighteenth century American newspapers is complicated by the fact that not all the British Library's holdings of this material are held at Colindale. The Burney collection of newspapers published between 1603 and 1818, which includes some American material, is kept in the main Library collection in Great Russell Street, as are two volumes of early newspapers purchased from the London bookseller Richard Kennett in 1841. These titles are listed in the British Library's General Catalogue and in a separate section at the back of the Eccles Centre guide. The remainder of the American newspaper collection is held at Colindale and listed in our catalogue only.

The first newspaper published in what is now the USA was Publick Occurences, published in Boston in 1690. Only one issue was ever published, as it was ruthlessly suppressed by the colonial governor of the time, and only one original copy is known to survive, which is in the Public Record Office at Kew. The Newspaper Library has a facsimile copy. The first continuously published American newspaper was the Boston Newsletter, which began in 1704. Again, the Newspaper Library has a facsimile copy of the first issue. This was followed in 1719 by the Boston Gazette, which we have on microfilm, and the American Weekly Mercury , published in Philadelphia, which is not held anywhere in the British Library. The first serious, non-establishment paper was the New England Courant, started in Boston in 1721 by James Franklin, the brother of Benjamin. The earliest original copy of an American paper in the Newspaper Library is the Boston Weekly Post Boy of 1736. We have quite a substantial collection of eighteenth century material published after this date in the original and even more on microfilm, as we have purchased all the eighteenth century material made available by Readex Microprint Corporation's collection Early Amercian Newspapers. Most eighteenth century American newspapers were modelled on the London newspapers of the time, included lots of London news and looked like London newspapers, with one notable difference being the regular inclusion of advertisements for runaway slaves.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries

In the nineteenth century American newspapers like their British counterparts tended to be tied to the main political factions. New York began to dominate and was the birthplace of the popular press. Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald in 1835, and laid great emphasis on newsgathering, even creating his own news, for example by sponsoring Stanley's search for Livingstone in 1871. Horace Greeley founded the New York Tribune in 1841, which was less brash and populist than the Herald, and probably more influential. The Herald and the Tribune amalgamated in 1924 and continued publication until 1966. The Newspaper Library has a full set of both. The European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, which began in 1887 as the Paris edition of the Herald, was relaunched in 1967 as the International Herald Tribune.

A major stimulus to the newspaper press was provided by the Civil War, as readers avidly awaited news of the conflict. An especially interesting item from the Civil War period in the Newspaper Library's collection is an issue of the Daily Citizen dated 2 July 1863, produced in Vicksburg in Mississippi, and printed on the back of pieces of wallpaper, the only paper available at the time.

In 1883 a Hungarian immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer bought the ailing New York World, introduced bold headlines which immigrants with limited English could understand, and combined this with support for liberal causes and a dash of sensationalism. This proved to be a very successful combination, and the New York World became the top-selling newspaper in the US. It ceased publication in 1931. In the 1890s Adolph S Ochs bought the New York Times, coined the phrase "all the news fit to print", and turned it into one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. The Newspaper Library has a full set of both the World and the Times. William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal, and he and Ochs both began a circulation war with Pulitzer. Hearst was the most sensationalist and the most successful. The term "yellow journalism" was coined, after the Yellow Kid comic strip in Hearst's New York Journal. These New York newspapers were very influential on the development of the British popular press and on British newspaper publishers such as Alfred Harmsworth, creator of the Daily Mail.

There was a revival in sensationalism called Jazz Journalism in the 1920s when the New York Daily News began publication. The New York tabloids continue this tradition to the present day. One of them, the New York Post, is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the US, having started publication in 1801. In the twentieth century American newspapers have largely moved away from any alliance with political parties and classes, although most are fairly conservative. Unsurprisingly the US press is now the largest in the world, with over 1700 dailies with a circulation of over 62 million. Few titles circulate nationally except perhaps the New York Times. USA Today was founded in 1982 as an attempt to produce a mid-market national paper, more on the British model.

The Newspaper Library currently takes over 30 US newspapers and magazines. These include the major newspapers from the largest cities such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Atlanta Constitution; and the "quasi-nationals" like USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor and the International Herald Tribune. Most of these titles are purchased on microfilm only and have printed indexes which we also have, so their contents is a lot more accessible than the contents of many British newspapers. We also have the New York Times from 1991 onwards and the International Herald Tribune from 1994 onwards available on CD-ROM.

The next issue of the Newsletter will describe more specialised aspects of the Newspaper Library's collection of United States material.