The Measure of Maturity: The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1765

HE American newspaper, like Benjamin Franklin, was born in Boston and matured in Philadelphia. It descended from the printed English-language newssheet in the form that evolved and flourished in the eighteenth century. An invention of the British government, the newssheet was adapted to private and commercial purposes about the turn of the century by a host of London publishers and soon afterward by provincial printers on both sides of the Atlantic. In its columns, the fundamentally aural culture of England and her colonies was first reflected and then amplified and partly transformed.' Although there is a certain validity in thinking of the Boston News-Letter, the New-York Gazette, the American Weekly Mercury, and their kind as primitive precursors of the professionalized mass circulation daily and weekly press of the nineteenth century, it is more helpful to one who seeks to understand the place of the printed word in early modern society to consider the provincial American newspaper on its own terms and in its own cultural setting. One way to study the newspaper press is to look closely at one paper