1800-1860: Communications: Publications

Chicago Tribune —founded in 1847, the paper quickly became a major source of information about the Midwest; after Joseph Medill and Charles Ray purchased it in 1855, it became one of the most influential newspapers in the nation;

William Lloyd Garrison, An Address. Delivered before the Free People of Color, in Philadelphia, New York, and Other Cities, during the Month of June, 1831 (Boston: Printed by S. Foster, 1831);

Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York: C. M. Saxton, Barker, 1860)—Greeley’s collected letters to the Tribune reveal popular nineteenth-century ideas about the need for American expansion in the West;

New Orleans Picayune —a “penny paper” founded in January 1837, this newspaper is a good source of news and opinions relating to the development of Texas and the Southwest in the 1840s and 1850s; the editor George Kendall’s reports from the Mexican War were widely republished, establishing him as a pioneering war correspondent and one of the most famous reporters of his era;

New York Weekly Tribune— published from 1841 to 1901, this newspaper circulated widely in the Midwest and the West, extending Horace Greeley’s editorial crusades well beyond New York and making him one of the nineteenth century’s most popular and influential journalists;

The Rocky Mountain News —founded in 1859 by William N. Byers, the paper is one of the best examples of the journalism common in the West in the mid nineteenth century; the newspaper’s editors led a campaign to promote both Denver and the Colorado Territory, and they became increasingly hostile to American Indians during the 1860s;

United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee of Commerce and Manufactures, Electromagnetic Telegraphs… (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Allen, 1838).