The first printing press in the North American colonies dates from 1638. The event occurred in New England, where Harvard College had opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two years earlier.
The college was to produce preachers for the needs of the expanding settlements, so inevitably there was a need for its own printing press.
With a printing press ordered from Holland, the professional printer Glover also went to the New World, though he died on the way. An entry in the diary of John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts colony, survives, “A printing press was established at Cambridge by (Stephen) Day, an assistant to Mr. Glover, who died on the sea voyage. The first thing that was printed was the oath of a free citizen; then an almanac compiled for New England by Mr. William Pierce, a navigator; and then there was a book of psalms arranged in verse.”
Thus it was by chance that Stephen Day was the American first printer, and the first American printed product, which saw the light of day in 1639.
and reflecting the intellectual demands of the Puritan community, was a legal document, an almanac (analogous to modern mass culture), and a quite successful example of clerical literature.
Speaking of the seventeenth-century printing of the North American colonies, one must have New England in mind first, since the first editions in Pennsylvania do not date until 1685, in New York the printing press appeared in 1693, and in Virginia only in 1730. The Puritan culture of New England, which was predominantly a book-biblical culture, dictated the appearance of specific literature, the main body of which consisted of pamphlets, pamphlets, tracts, and collections of religious and moral character.
Although there was no official censorship in New England until 1662, religious Puritan intolerance led to repressive measures against “unreliable” publications.
Among the first manifestations of censorship restrictions was the publication of William Pynchon’s religious pamphlet The Ingenious Price of Our Redemption (1650), which was not only declared “erroneous and heretical,” but was ordered to be burned by the executioner in Boston’s market square. Four years later similar sanctions were announced against Quaker tracts that had infiltrated New England, and in 1669 the court, after learning of Thomas of Campia’s On the Imitation of Christ, which was about to be printed, ordered censorial revisions to the text.
The English government assigned the duty of supervising the printing to the royal governors of the North American colonies in the first instance.
Not surprisingly, the appearance of the first newspaper in the North American British colonies encountered censorial difficulties. This momentous event had to do with Boston. It was there, on September 25, 1690, that Benjamin Harris, a printer who had moved from London to Boston, attempted to publish the first American newspaper. It was called Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, was intended to appear monthly or more frequently (depending on the nature and importance of the news reported), and was a small four-page spread sheet, about 19 x 29 centimeters. The text was arranged in two columns, with the exception of the last page, which, due to lack of material, was blank.
Of the monthly magazines of this period, The Scribner’s Monthly (1870-1881), a New York social and literary magazine patronized by the mosh pit publishing firm Scribner’s, stood out. Under the editorship of Gilbert Holland, who came out of the Springfield Republican school of journalism, The Scribner’s Monthly managed to conquer the readership with a reasonable combination of social and political publications (its pages defended ideas of religious tolerance, raised problems of international copyright, and advanced ideas for reform in the civil service) and an interesting selection of literary and critical material.
Also interesting was The Scribner’s Monthly’s new approach to using illustrations of very high quality, which was a credit to the art editor Alexander Drake. The engravings of Timothy Cole and Theodore De Winne made The Scribner’s Monthly one of the most exquisitely designed magazines of the period.
At the end of the nineteenth century, events occurred that, to a large extent, determined the main trends in the further development of the American press. Particularly noteworthy is the emergence of “new journalism,” which gave rise to both the phenomenon of the “yellow press” and the standards of “quality journalism,” the “mud-slingers” movement, industrialization and monopolization in the newspaper and magazine business.