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My article “Enquire of the Printer: Newspaper Advertising and the Moral Economy of the North American Slave Trade, 1704–1807” is out in Early American Studies! I want to share a little bit about the article because I'm proud of it & think it's important...
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760446
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760446
The article started when I stumbled across an 18th century newspaper advertisement selling an enslaved person (sadly not unusual) that noted "enquire of the printer" at the bottom. I had seen that in other advertisements, but I hadn't given it much thought before...
Luckily it was about midnight, the house was quiet, and I didn't have any pressing tasks for tomorrow. So I stayed up almost all night trying to figure out what was going on here. Were these newspaper printers really selling, or at least brokering the sale of, enslaved people?
Turns out, thousands of times over, yes. Just about any newspaper printer you care to name in the 18th century was a human trafficker. Ben Franklin actually played a key role in exporting this practice of printers brokering slave sales from Boston (where it originated).
We often think of newspapers as the vehicles of revolutionary politics. We also know that they served slave capitalism, not just with sales for enslaved people, but also runaway ads, etc. It's jarring to modern eyes see a slave sale ad next to an ad for the Dec. of Independence.
Easy to dismiss as a presentist reading, though. What really struck me, though, is that eventually contemporaries started to see the oddness of this for themselves. Here's one example, from a 1796 newspaper:
I found a number of critical comments like that. They make it clear that the proximity of slavery and freedom in the pages of the same newspaper was confusing and unacceptable to them. We cannot, then, simply dismiss this as an unconscious form of cognitive dissonance.
It is in no way presentist, I realized, to recognize how slavery and the print culture that reinforced revolutionary politics were intentionally entangled. The origin story of American journalism can't be told without reference to the cruelty and horrors of enslavement.
On a wonkier, more methodological note, it was incredibly striking to me, as a historian of early American media, to see people commenting on the proximity of various newspaper items.
These days, most historians experience these papers through online interfaces, rather than in person. Most of these interfaces use OCR text searching and show you one article at a time. But that's not how people read these papers. Proximities were meaningful.
As @lara_putnam argues in "The Transnational and the Text-Searchable" (one of the most important @AmHistReview essays of the last decade) we're robbing ourselves of incredibly meaningful context by reading in these narrow boxes and moving on quickly.
Finally, because I was teaching digital history this spring, I decided to create a companion site for the article. It's a work in progress, but if you'd like a shorter, more visual version, of this essay, here you go. It has some cool stuff. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7d6dcdc8d7a24d34a08f1605e64c292e
(the digital version also fixes a minor error I noticed too late in the production process thanks to a @Boston1775 blog post I had not seen when I originally wrote it...)
